LIMBO 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
LEDA; AND OTHER POEMS 



LIMBO 



BY ALDOUS HUXLEY 



NEW YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 






First Published .... January 2g, ig20 
Second Impression . . . February //, /9-?o 



Qlft 

Publisher 

JON 30 g2C 



^// rights reserved 



CONTENTS 



PAGB 

FARCICAL HISTORY OF RICHARD GREENOW . I 

HAPPILY EVER AFTER. . , . . Il6 

EUPOMPUS GAVE SPLENDOUR TO ART BY 

NUMBERS 192 

HAPPY FAMILIES . . . . .211 

CYNTHIA 245 

THE BOOKSHOP 259 

THE DEATH OF LULLY . . .269 



LIMBO 

FARCICAL HISTORY OF 
RICHARD GREENOW 



THE most sumptuous present that 
Millicent received on her seventh 
birthday was a doll's house. " With 
love to darling little Mill from Aunty 
Loo." Aunt Loo was immensely rich, and 
the doll's house was almost as grandiose 
and massive as herself. 

It was divided into four rooms, each 
papered in a different colour and each 
furnished as was fitting : beds and wash- 
stands and wardrobes in the upstair 
rooms, arm-chairs and artificial plants 
below. " Replete with every modern 
convenience ; sumptuous appointments." 
There was even a cold collation ready 
spread on the dining-room table — two 
scarlet lobsters on a dish, and a ham that 



2 LIMBO 

had been sliced into just enough to reveal 
an internal complexion of the loveliest 
pink and white. One might go on talk- 
ing about the doll's house for ever, it was 
so beautiful. Such, at any rate, was the 
opinion of Millicent's brother Dick. He 
would spend hours opening and shutting 
the front door, peeping through the 
windows, arranging and rearranging the 
furniture. As for Millicent, the gorgeous 
present left her cold. She had been 
hoping — and, what is more, praying, 
fervently, every night for a month — that 
Aunty Loo would give her a toy sewing- 
machine (one of the kind that works, 
though) for her birthday. 

She was bitterly disappointed when the 
doll's house came instead. But she bore 
it all stoically and managed to be wonder- 
fully polite to Aunty Loo about the whole 
affair. She never looked at the doll's 
house : it simply didn't interest her. 

Dick had already been at a preparatory 
school for a couple of terms. Mr. Killi- 
grew, the headmaster, thought him a 
promising boy. " Has quite a remarkable 
aptitude for mathematics," he wrote in 
his report, " He has started Algebra 



RICHARD GREENOW 3 

this term and shows a " — " quite remark- 
able " scratched out (the language of 
reports is apt to be somewhat limited) — 
" a very unusual grasp of the subject." 
Mr. Killigrew didn't know that his pupil 
also took an interest in dolls : if he had, 
he would have gibed at Dick as unmerci- 
fully and in nearly the same terms as 
Dick's fellow-schoolboys — for shepherds 
grow to resemble their sheep and peda- 
gogues their childish charges. But of 
course Dick would never have dreamt of 
telling anyone at school about it. He 
was chary of letting even the people at 
home divine his weakness, and -when 
anyone came into the room where the 
doll's house was, he would put his hands 
in his pockets and stroll out, whistling the 
tune of, " There is a Happy Land far, far 
away, where they have Ham and Eggs 
seven times a day," as though he had 
merely stepped in to have a look at the 
beastly thing — just to give it a kick. 

When he wasn't playing with the doll's 
house, Dick spent his holiday time in 
reading, largely, devouringly. No length 
or incomprehensibility could put him off ; 
he had swallowed down Robert Elsmere in 



4 LIMBO 

the three-volume edition at the age of 
eight. When he wasn't reading he used 
to sit and think about Things in General 
and Nothing in Particular ; in fact, as 
Millicent reproachfully put it, he just 
mooned about. Millicent, on the other 
hand, was always busily doing something : 
weeding in the garden, or hoeing, or 
fruit-picking (she could be trusted not to 
eat more than the recognized tariff — one 
in twenty raspberries or one in forty 
plums) ; helping Kate in the kitchen ; 
knitting mufflers for those beings known 
vaguely as The Cripples, while her mother 
read aloud in the evenings before bed- 
time. She disapproved of Dick's mooning, 
but Dick mooned all the same. 

When Dick was twelve and a half he 
knew enough about mathematics and 
history and the dead languages to realize 
that his dear parents were profoundly 
ignorant and uncultured. But, what was 
more pleasing to the dear parents, he 
knew enough to win a scholarship at 
iEsop College, which is one of our 
Greatest Public Schools. 

If this were a Public School story, I 
should record the fact that, while at 



RICHARD GREENOW 5 

-^sop, Dick swore, lied, blasphemed, 
repeated dirty stories, read the articles in 
John Bull about brothels disguised as 
nursing-homes and satyrs disguised as 
curates ; that he regarded his masters, 
with very few exceptions, as fools, not 
even always well-meaning. And so on. 
All which would be quite true, but beside 
the point. For this is not one of the con- 
ventional studies of those clever young 
m_en who discover Atheism and Art at 
School, Socialism at the University, and, 
passing through the inevitable stage of 
Sex and Syphilis after taking their B.A., 
turn into maturely brilliant novelists at 
the age of tw^enty-five. I prefer, therefore, 
to pass over the minor incidents of a 
difficult pubescence, touching only on 
those points which seem to throw a light 
on the future career of our hero. 

It is possible for those who desire it — 
incredible as the thing may appear — to 
learn something at /Esop College. Dick 
even learnt a great deal. From the be- 
ginning he was the young Benjamin of 
his mathematical tutor, Mr. Skewbauld, a 
man of great abilities in his own art, and 
who, though wholly incapable of keeping 



6 LIMBO 

a form in order, could make his private 
tuition a source of much profit to a 
mathematically minded boy. Mr. Skew- 
bauld's house was the worst in JEsop : 
Dick described it as a mixture between 
a ghetto and a home for the m.entally 
deficient, and when he read in Sir Thomas 
Browne that it was a Vulgar Error to 
suppose that Jews stink, he wrote a letter 
to the School Magazine exploding that 
famous doctor as a quack and a charlatan, 
whose statements ran counter to the 
manifest facts of everyday life in Mr. 
Skewbauld's house. It may seem sur- 
prising that Dick should have read Sir 
Thomas Browne at all. But he was more 
than a mere mathematician. He filled 
the ample leisure, which is ^^sop's most 
precious gift to those of its Alumni who 
know how to use it, with much and 
varied reading in history, in literature, 
in physical science, and in more than one 
foreign language. Dick was something 
of a prodigy. 

" Greenow's an intellectual," was 
Mr. Copthorne-Slazenger's contemptuous 
verdict. " I have the misfortune to have 
two or three intellectuals in my house. 



RICHARD GREENOW 7 

They're all of them friends of his. I 
think he's a Bad Influence in the School." 
Copthorne-Slazenger regarded himself as 
the perfect example of mens sana in 
corpore sano^ the soul of an English 
gentleman in the body of a Greek god. 
Unfortunately his legs were rather too 
short and his lower lip was underhung 
like a salmon's. 

Dick had, indeed, collected about him 
a band of kindred spirits. There was 
Partington, who specialized in history ; 
Gay, who had read all the classical writings 
of the golden age and was engaged in the 
study of mediaeval Latin ; Fletton, who 
w^as fantastically clever and had brought 
the art of being idle to a pitch never 
previously reached in the annals of iEsop. 
These were his chief friends, and a queer- 
looking group they made — Dick, small 
and dark and nervous ; Partington, all 
roundness, and whose spectacles were two 
moons in a moonface ; Gay, with the 
stiff walk of a little old man ; and Fletton, 
who looked like nobody so much as Mr. 
Jingle, tall and thin with a twisted, comical 
face. 

" An ugly skulking crew," Copthorne- 



8 LIMBO 

Slazenger, conscious of his own Olympian 
splendour, would say as lie saw them pass. 

With these faithful friends Dick should 
have been — and indeed for the most 
part was — very happy. Between them 
they mustered up a great stock of know- 
ledge ; they could discuss every subject 
under the sun. They were a liberal 
education and an amusement to one 
another. There were times, however, 
when Dick was filled with a vague, but 
acute, discontent. He wanted som.ething 
which his friends could not give him ; 
but what, but what ? The discontent 
rankled under the surface, like a sup- 
pressed measles. It was Lord Francis 
Quarles who brought it out and made 
the symptoms manifest. 

Francis Quarles was a superb creature, 
with the curly forehead of a bull and the 
face and limbs of a Graeco-=Roman statue. 
It was a sight worth seeing when he 
looked down through half-shut eyelids, 
in his usual attitude of sleepy arrogance, 
on the world about him. He w^as in 
effect what Mr. Copthorne-Slazenger 
imagined himself to be, and he shared 
that gentleman's dislike for Dick and his 



RICHARD GREENOW 9 

friends. " Yellow little atheists/' he 
called them. He always stood up for 
God and the Church of England ; they 
w^ere essential adjuncts to the aristocracy. 
God, indeed, was almost a member of the 
Family ; lack of belief in Him amounted 
to a personal insult to the name of 
Quarles. 

It was half-way through the summer 
term, when Dick was sixteen, on one of 
those days of brilliant sunshine and cloud- 
less blue, when the sight of beautiful and 
ancient buildings is peculiarly poignant. 
Their age and quiet stand out in melan- 
choly contrast against the radiant life of 
the summer ; and at ^sop the boys go 
laughing under their antique shadow ; 
'' Little victims " — you feel how right 
Gray was. Dick was idly strolling across 
the quadrangle, engaged in merely ob- 
serving the beauty about him — the 
golden-grey chapel, with its deep geo- 
metrical shadows between the buttresses, 
the comely rose-coloured shapes of the 
brick-built Tudor buildings, the weather- 
cocks glittering in the sun, the wheeling 
flurries of pigeons. His old discontent 
had seized on him again, and to-day in 



lo LIMBO 

the presence of all this beauty it had 
become almost unbearable. All at once, 
out of the mouth of one of the dark little 
tunnelled doors pierced in the flanks of 
the sleeping building, a figure emerged 
into the light. It was Francis Quarles, 
clad in white flannels and the radiance 
of the sunshine. He appeared like a 
revelation, bright, beautiful, and sudden, 
before Dick's eyes. A violent emotion 
seized him ; his heart leapt, his bowels 
were moved within him ; he felt a 
little sick and faint — he had fallen in 
love. 

Francis passed by without deigning 
to notice him. His head was high, his 
eyes drowsy under their drooping lids. 
He was gone, and for Dick all the light 
was out, the beloved quadrangle was a 
prison-yard, the pigeons a loathsome flock 
of carrion eaters. Gay and Partington 
came up behind him with shouts of 
invitation. Dick walked rudely away. 
God ! how he hated them and their 
wretched, silly talk and their yellow, ugly 
faces. 

The weeks that followed were full 
of strangeness. For the first timiC in his 



RICHARD GREENOW ii 

life Dick took to writing poetry. There 
was one sonnet which began : 

Is it a vision or a waking dream ? 

Or is it truly Apollo that I see, 

Come from his sylvan haunts in Arcady 



rj. riaugh and loiter 
\sing and sauntei 



sing and saunter by an English stream. . . . 

He kept on repeating the words to 
himself, " Sylvan haunts in Arcady," 
" laugh and loiter " (after much thought 
he had adopted that as more liquidly 
melodious than " sing and saunter "). 
How beautiful they sounded ! — as beauti- 
ful as Keats — more beautiful, for they 
were his own. 

He avoided the company of Gay and 
Fletton and Partington ; they had be- 
come odious to him, and their conversa- 
tion, when he could bring himself to 
listen to it, was, somehow, almost incom- 
prehensible. He would sit for hours 
alone in his study ; not working — for 
he could not understand the mathe- 
matical problems on which he had been 
engaged before the fateful day in the 
quadrangle — but reading novels and the 
poetry of Mrs. Browning, and at intervals 



12 LIMBO 

writing something rather ecstatic of his 
own. After a long preparatory screwing 
up of his courage, he dared at last to 
send a fag with a note to Francis, asking 
him to tea ; and when Francis rather 
frigidly refused, he actually burst into 
tears. He had not cried like that since 
he was a child. 

He became suddenly very religious. 
He would spend an hour on his knees 
every night, praying, praying with frenzy. 
He mortified the flesh with fasting and 
watching. He even went so far as to 
flagellate himself — or at least tried to ; 
for it is very difficult to flagellate yourself 
adequately with a cane in a room so 
small that any violent gesture imperils 
the bric-a-brac. He would pass half 
the night stark naked, in absurd postures, 
trying to hurt himself. And then, after 
the dolorously pleasant process of self- 
maceration was over, he used to lean out 
of the window and listen to the murmurs 
of the night and fill his spirit with the 
warm velvet darkness of midsummer. 
Copthorne-Slazenger, coming back by the 
late train from town one night, hap- 
pened to see his moon-pale face hanging 



RICHARD GREENOW 13 

out of window and was delighted to be 
able to give him two hundred Greek 
lines to remind him that even a member 
of the Sixth Form requires sleep some- 
times. 

The fit lasted three weeks. " I can't 
think what's the matter with you, 
Greenow/' complained Mr. Skewbauld 
snufflinglv. " You seem incapable or un- 
willing to do anything at all. I suspect 
the cause is constipation. If only every- 
one would take a little paraffin every 
night before going to bed ! . . ." Mr. 
Skewbauld's self-imposed mission in life 
was the propagation of the paraffin habit. 
It was the universal panacea — the cure 
for every ill. 

His friends of before the crisis shook 
their heads and could only suppose him 
mad. And then the fit ended as suddenly 
as it had begun. 

It happened at a dinner-party given 
by the Cravisters. Dr. Cravister was 
the Headmaster of ^Esop — a good, gentle, 
learned old man, wdth snow-white hair 
and a saintly face which the spirit of 
comic irony had embellished with a nose 
that might, so red and bulbous it was, 



14 LIMBO 

have been borrowed from the properties 
of a music-hall funny man. And then 
there was Mrs. Cravister, large and stately 
as a galleon with all sails set. Those who 
met her for the first time might be awed 
by the dignity of what an Elizabethan 
would have called her " swelling port." 
But those who knew her well went in 
terror of the fantastic spirit which lurked 
behind the outward majesty. They were 
afraid of what that richly modulated 
voice of hers might utter. It was not 
merely that she was malicious — and she 
had a gift of ever-ready irony ; no, what 
was alarming in all her conversation was 
the element of the unexpected. With 
most people one feels comfortably secure 
that they will always say the obvious 
and ordinary things ; with Mrs. Cravister, 
never. The best one could do was to be 
on guard and to try and look, when she 
made a more than usually characteristic 
remark, less of a bewildered fool than one 
felt. 

Mrs. Cravister received her guests — 
they were all of them boys — with 
stately courtesy. They found it pleasant 
to be taken so seriously, to be treated as 



RICHARD GREENOW 15 

perfectly grown men ; but at the same 
time, they always had with Mrs. Cravister 
a faint uncomfortable suspicion that all 
her poHteness was an irony so exquisite 
as to be practically undistinguishable 
from ingenuousness. 

'' Good evenings Mr. Gay," she said, 
holding out her hand and shutting her 
eyes ; it was one of her disconcerting 
habits, this shutting of the eyes. " What 
a pleasure it will be to hear you talking 
to us again about eschatology." 

Gay, who had never talked about 
eschatology and did not know the mean- 
ing of the word, smiled a little dimly and 
made a protesting noise. 

" Eschatology ? What a charming 
subject ! " The fluty voice belonged to 
Henry Cravister, the Headmaster's son, 
a man of about forty who worked in the 
British Museum. He was almost too 
cultured, too erudite. 

" But I don't know anything about it," 
said Gay desperately. 

" Spare us your modesty," Henry 
Cravister protested. 

His mother shook hands with the other 
guests, putting some at their ease with a 



i6 LIMBO 

charming phrase and embarrassing others 
by saying something baffling and unex- 
pected that would have dismayed even the 
hardiest diner-out, much more a school- 
boy tremblingly on his good behaviour. 
At the tail end of the group of boys stood 
Dick and Francis Quarles. Mrs. Cravister 
slowly raised her heavy waxen eyelids and 
regarded them a moment in silence. 

" The Graeco-Roman and the Gothic 
side by side ! '' she exclaimed. " Lord 
Francis is something in the Vatican, a 
rather late piece of work ; and Mr. 
Greenow is a little gargoyle from the 
roof of Notre Dame de Paris. Two 
epochs of art — how clearly one sees the 
difference. And my husband, I always 
think, is purely Malayan in design — 
purely Malayan,^' she repeated as she 
shook hands with the tw^o boys, 

Dick blushed to the roots of his hair, 
but Francis' impassive arrogance re- 
mained unmoved. Dick stole a glance 
in his direction, and at the sight of his 
calm face he felt a new wave of adoring 
admiration sweeping through him. 

The company was assembled and com- 
plete. Mrs. Cravister looked round the 



RICHARD GREENOW 17 

room and remarking, " We won't wait 
for Mr. Copthorne-Slazenger," sailed 
majestically in the direction of the door. 
She particularly disliked this member of 
her husband's staff, and lost no oppor- 
tunity of being rude to him. Thus, 
where an ordinary hostess might have 
said, " Shall we come in to dinner ? " 
Mrs. Cravister employed the formula, 
"We won't wait for Mr. Copthorne- 
Slazenger " ; and a guest unacquainted 
with Mrs. Cravister's habits would be 
surprised on entering the dining-room to 
find that all the seats at the table were 
filled, and that the meal proceeded 
smoothly without a single further refer- 
ence to the missing Copthorne, who 
never turned up at all, for the good reason 
that he had never been invited. 

Dinner began a little nervously and 
uncomfortably. At one end of the table 
the Headmaster was telling anecdotes 
of -^sop in the sixties, at which the 
boys in his neighbourhood laughed with 
a \dolent nervous insincerity. Henry 
Cravister, still talking about eschatology, 
was quoting from Sidonius ApoUinarius 
and Commodianus of Gaza. Mrs. 



1 8 LIMBO 

Cravister, who had been engaged in a 
long colloquy with the butler, suddenly 
turned on Dick with the remark, " And 
so you have a deep, passionate fondness 
for cats," as though they had been inti- 
mately discussing the subject for the 
last hour. Dick had enough presence of 
mind to say that, yes, he did like cats — 
all except those Manx ones that had no 
tails. 

" No tails," Mrs. Cravister repeated — 
" no tails. Like men. How symbolical 
everything is ! " 

Francis Quarles was sitting opposite 
him, so that Dick had ample opportunity 
to look at his idol. How perfectly he 
did everything, down to eating his soup ! 
The first lines of a new poem began to 
buzz in Dick's head : 

" All, all I lay at thy proud marble feet — 
My heart, my love and all my future days. 
Upon thy brow for ever let me gaze, 
For ever touch thy hair : oh (something) sweet . . ." 

Would he be able to find enough 
rhymes to make it into a sonnet ? Mrs. 
Cravister, who had been leaning back in 
her chair for the last few minutes in a 



RICHARD GREENOW 19 

state of exhausted abstraction, opened 
her eyes and said to nobody in particular : 

" Ah, how I envy the calm of those 
Chinese dynasties ! " 

" WTiich Chinese dynasties ? " a well- 
meaning youth inquired. 

'' Any Chinese dynasty, the more 
remote the better. Henry, tell us the 
names of some Chinese dynasties." 

In obedience to his mother, Henry 
delivered a brief disquisition on the 
history of pohtics, art, and letters in the 
Far East. 

The Headmaster continued his 
reminiscences. 

An angel of silence passed. The boys, 
whose shyness had begun to wear off, 
became suddenly and painfully conscious 
of hearing themselves eating. Mrs. 
Cravister saved the situation. 

" Lord Francis knows all about birds," 
she said in her most thrilling voice. 
" Perhaps he can tell us why it is the 
unhappy fate of the carrion crow to mate 
for life." 

Conversation again becam^e general. 
Dick was still thinking about his sonnet. 
Oh, these rhvmes ! — praise, bays, rounde- 



20 LIMBO 

lays, amaze : greet, bleat, defeat, beat, 
paraclete. . . . 

"... to sing the praise 
In anthems high and solemn roundelays 
Of Holy Father, Son and Paraclete." 

That was good — damned good ; but it 
hardly seemed to fit in with the first 
quatrain. It would do for one of his 
religious poems, though. He had written 
a lot of sacred verse lately. 

Then suddenly, cutting across his 
ecstatic thoughts, came the sound of 
Henry Cravister's reedy voice. 

" But I always find Pater's style so 
coarse^^- it said. 

Something explosive took place in 
Dick's head. It often happens when one 
blows one's nose that some passage in the 
labyrinth connecting ears and nose and 
throat is momentarily blocked, and one 
becomes deaf and strangely dizzy. Then, 
suddenly, the mucous bubble bursts, 
sound rushes back to the brain, the head 
feels clear and stable once more. It was 
something like this, but transposed into 
terms of the spirit, that seemed now to 
have happened to Dick. 



RICHARD GREENOW 21 

It was as though some mysterious 
obstruction in his brain, which had 
dammed up and diverted his faculties from 
their normal course during the past 
three weeks, had been on a sudden over- 
thrown. His life seemed to be flowing 
once more along fam.iliar channels. 

He was himself again. 

" But I always find Pater's style so 
coarse,'^'' 

These few words of solemn foolery 
were the spell which had somehow per- 
formed the miracle. It was just the 
sort of remark he might have made three 
weeks ago, before the crisis. For a moment, 
indeed, he almost thought it was he him- 
self who had spoken ; his own authentic 
voice, carried across the separating gulf of 
days, had woken him again to life ! 

He looked at Francis Quarles. Why, 
the fellow w^as nothing but a great 
prize ox, a monstrous animal. '' There 
was a Lady loved a Swine. Honey, said 
she . . .'' It was ignoble, it was 
ridiculous. He could have hidden his 
face in his hands for pure shame ; shame 
tingled through his body. Goodness, 
how grotesquely he had behaved ! 



22 LIMBO 

He leaned across and began talking 
to Henry Cravister about Pater and 
style and books in general. Cravister 
was amazed at the maturity of the boy's 
mind ; for he possessed to a remarkable 
degree that critical faculty which in the 
vast majority of boys is — and from their 
lack of experience must be — wholly 
lacking. 

" You must come and see me some 
time when you're in London," Henry 
Cravister said to him when the time came 
for the boys to get back to their houses. 
Dick was flattered ; he had not said that 
to any of the others. He walked home 
with Gay, laughing and talking quite in 
his old fashion. Gay marvelled at the 
change in his companion ; strange, in- 
explicable fellow ! but it was pleasant 
to have him back again, to repossess the 
lost friend. Arrived in his room, Dick 
sat down to attack the last set of mathe- 
matical problems that had been set him. 
Three hours ago they had appeared 
utterly incomprehensible ; now he under- 
stood them perfectly. His mind was 
like a giant refreshed, delighting in its 
strength. 



RICHARD GREENOW 23 

Next day Mr. Skewbauld congratulated 
him on his answers. 

" You seem quite to have recovered 
your old form, Greenow/' he said. '' Did 
you take my advice ? Paraffin regu- 
larly . . ." 

Looking back on the events of the last 
weeks, Dick was disquieted. Mr. Skew- 
bauld mxight be wrong in recommending 
paraffin, but he was surely right in sup- 
posing that something was the matter 
and required a remedy. What could it 
be ? He felt so well ; but that, of 
course, proved nothing. He began doing 
Miiller's exercises, and he bought a jar 
of malt extract and a bottle of hypo- 
phosphites. After much consultation of 
medical handbooks and the encyclo- 
paedia, he came to the conclusion that he 
was suffering from anaemia of the brain ; 
and for some time one fixed idea haunted 
him : Suppose the blood completely 
ceased to flow to his brain, suppose he 
were to fall down suddenly dead or, 
worse, become utterly and hopelessly 
paralysed. . . . Happily the distractions 
of iEsop in the summer term were 
sufficiently numerous and delightful to 



24 LIMBO 

divert his mind from this gloomy brood- 
ing, and he felt so well and in such high 
spirits that it was impossible to go on 
seriously believing that he was at death's 
door. Still, whenever he thought of 
the events of those strange weeks he was 
troubled. He did not like being con- 
fronted by problems which he could 
not solve. During the rest of his stay 
at school he was troubled by no more 
than the merest velleities of a relapse. 
A fit of moon-gazing and incapacity to 
understand the higher mathematics had 
threatened him one time when he was 
working rather too strenuously for a 
scholarship. But a couple of days' 
complete rest had staved off the peril. 
There had been rather a painful scene, 
too, at Dick's last School Concert. Oh, 
those iEsop concerts ! Musically speak- 
ing, of course, they are deplorable ; but 
how rich from all other points of view 
than the m.erely aesthetic ! The supreme 
moment arrives at the very end when 
three of the most eminent and popular 
of those about to leave mount the plat- 
form together and sing the famous 
'^iEsop, Farewell." Greatest of school 



RICHARD GREENOW 25 

songs ! The words are not much, but 
the tune, which goes swooning along in 
three-four time, is perhaps the master- 
piece of the late organist. Dr. Pilch. 

Dick was leaving, but he was not a 
sufficiently heroic figure to have been 
asked to sing, '' iEsop, Farewell." He 
was simply a member of the audience, 
and one, moreover, who had come to the 
concert in a critical and mocking spirit. 
For, as he had an ear for music, it was 
impossible for him to take the concert 
very seriously. The choir had clamor- 
ously re-crucified the Messiah ; the 
soloists had all done their worst ; and 
now it was time for "^sop. Farewell." 
The heroes climbed on to the stage. 
They were three demi-gods, but Francis 
Quarles was the most splendid of the 
group as he stood there with head thrown 
back, eyes almost closed, calm and appar- 
ently unconscious of the crowd that 
seethed, actually and metaphorically, 
beneath him. He was wearing an 
enormous pink orchid in the buttonhole 
of his evening coat ; his shirt-front 
twinkled with diamond studs ; the 
buttons of his waistcoat were of fine 



26 LIMBO 

gold. At the sight of him, Dick felt his 
heart beating violently ; he was not, he 
painfully realized, master of himself. 

The music struck up— Dum, dum, 
dumdidi, dumdidi ; dum, dum, dum, 
and so on. So like the Merry Widow. 
In two days' time he would have left 
iEsop for ever. The prospect had never 
affected him very intensely. He had 
enjoyed himself at school, but he had 
never, like so many iEsopians, fallen in 
love with the place. It remained for 
him an institution ; for others it was 
almost an adored person. But to-night 
his spirit, rocked on a treacly ocean of 
dominant sevenths, succumbed utterly 
to the sweet sorrow of parting. And 
there on the platform stood Francis. 
Oh, how radiantly beautiful ! And when 
he began, in his rich tenor, the first verse 
of the Valedictory : 

" Farewell, Mother ^sop, 
Our childhood's home ! 
Our spirit is with thee, 
Though far we roam ..." 

he found himself hysterically sobbing. 



RICHARD GREENOW 27 



II 

CANTELOUP COLLEGE is per- 
haps the most frightful building 
in Oxford — and to those who know their 
Oxford well this will mean not a little. 
Up till the middle of last century Cante- 
loup possessedtwoquadranglesof fifteenth- 
century buildings, unimpressive and petty, 
like so much of College architecture, but 
at least quiet, unassuming, decent. After 
the accession of Victoria the College 
began to grow in numbers, wealth, and 
pride. The old buildings were too small 
and unpretentious for w^hat had now 
become a Great College. In the summer 
of 1867 a great madness fell upon the 
Master and Fellows. They hired a most 
distinguished architect, bred up in the 
school of Ruskin, who incontinently 
razed all the existing buildings to the 
ground and erected in their stead a vast 
pile in the approved Mauro-Venetian 
Gothic of the period. The New Build- 
ings contained a great number of rooms, 
each served by a separate and almost 
perpendicular staircase ; and if nearly 



28 LIMBO 

half of them were so dark as to make it 
necessary to light them artificially for all 
but three hours out of the twenty-four, 
this slight defect was wholly outweighed 
by the striking beauty, from outside, of 
the Neo-Byzantine loopholes by which 
they were, euphemistically, " lighted.'' 

Prospects in Canteloup may not please ; 
but man, on the other hand, tends to be 
less vile there than in many other places. 
There is an equal profusion at Canteloup 
of Firsts and Blues ; there are Union 
orators of every shade of opinion and 
young men so languidly well bred as to 
take no interest in politics of any kind ; 
there are drinkers of cocoa and drinkers 
of champagne. Canteloup is a microcosm, 
a whole world in miniature ; and whatever 
your temperament and habits may be, 
whether you wish to drink, or row, or 
work, or hunt, Canteloup will provide you 
with congenial companions and a spiritual 
home. 

Lack of athletic distinction had pre- 
vented Dick from being, at JEsop, a hero 
or anything like one. At Canteloup, in 
a less barbarically ordered state of society, 
things were different. His rooms in the 



RICHARD GREENOW 29 

Venetian gazebo over the North Gate 
became the meeting-place of all that was 
most intellectually distinguished in Canta- 
loup and the University at large. He had 
had his sitting-room austerely upholstered 
and papered in grey. A large white 
Chinese figure of the best period stood 
pedestalled in one corner, and on the 
walls there hung a few uncompromisingly 
good drawings and lithographs by modern 
artists. Fletton, who had accompanied 
Dick from JEsop to Canteloup, called it 
the " cerebral chamber " ; and with its 
prevailing tone of brain-coloured grey and 
the rather dry intellectual taste of its 
decorations it deserved the name. 

To-night the cerebral chamber had 
been crammed. The Canteloup branch 
of the Fabian Society, under Dick's 
presidency, had been holding a meeting. 
" Art in the Socialist State " was what 
they had been discussing. And now the 
meeting had broken up, leaving nothing 
but three empty jugs that had once con- 
tained mulled claret and a general air of 
untidiness to testify to its having taken 
place at all. Dick stood leaning an elbow 
on the mantelpiece and absent-mindedly 



30 LIMBO 

kicking, to the great detriment of his 
pumps, at the expiring red embers in 
the grate. From the depths of a huge 
and cavernous arm-chair, Fletton, pipe 
in mouth, fumed like a sleepy volcano. 

" I liked the way, Dick," he said, with a 
laugh — ^^the way you went for the Arty- 
Crafties. You utterly destroyed them." 

" I merely pointed out, what is suffi- 
ciently obvious, that crafts are not art, 
nor anything like it, that's all." Dick 
snapped out the words. He was nervous 
and excited, and his body felt as though it 
were full of compressed springs ready to 
jump at the most imponderable touch. 
He was always like that after making a 
speech. 

" You did it very effectively," said 
Fletton. There was a silence between 
the two young men. 

A noise like the throaty yelling of 
savages in rut came wafting up from the 
quadrangle on which the windows of the 
cerebral cham.ber opened. Dick started ; 
all the springs within him had gone off at 
once — a thousand simultaneous Jack-in- 
the-boxes. 

" It's only Francis Quarles' dinner- 



RICHARD GREENOW 31 

party becoming vocal," Fletton explained. 
" Blind mouths, as Milton would call 
them." 

Dick began restlessly pacing up and 
down the room. When Fletton spoke to 
him, he did not reply or, at best, gave 
utterance to a monosyllable or a grunt. 

" My dear Dick," said the other at last, 
"you're not very good company to-night," 
and heaving himself up from the arm-chair, 
Fletton went shuffling in his loose, heel- 
less slippers tov/ards the door. " I'm 
going to bed." 

Dick paused in his lion-like prowling to 
listen to the receding sound of feet on the 
stairs. All was silent now : Gott sei dank. 
He went into his bedroom. It was there 
that he kept his piano, for it was a piece of 
furniture too smugly black and polished 
to have a place in the cerebral chamber. 
He had been thirsting after his piano all 
the time Fletton was sitting there, damn 
him ! He drew^ up a chair and began to 
play over and over a certain series of chords. 
With his left hand he struck an octave G in 
the base, while his right dwelt lovingly on 
F, B, and E. A luscious chord, beloved by 
Mendelssohn — a chord in which the native 



32 LIMBO 

richness of the dominant seventh is made 
more rich, more piercing sweet by the 
addition of a divine discord. G, F, B, 
and E — he let the notes hang tremulously 
on the silence, savoured to the full their 
angelic overtones ; then, v^hen the sound 
of the chord had almost died away, he let 
it droop reluctantly through D to the 
simple, triumphal beauty of C natural — 
the diapason closing full in what was for 
Dick a wholly ineffable emotion. 

He repeated that dying fall again and 
again, perhaps twenty times. Then, 
when he was satiated with its deliciousness, 
he rose from the piano and opening the 
lowest drawer of the wardrobe pulled out 
from under his evening clothes a large 
portfolio. He undid the strings ; it was 
full of photogravure reproductions from 
various Old Masters. There was an almost 
complete set of Greuze's works, several 
of the most striking Ary Scheffers, some 
Alma Tadema, some Leighton, photo- 
graphs of sculpture by Torwaldsen and 
Canova, Boecklin's " Island of the Dead,'' 
religious pieces by Holman Hunt, and a 
large packet of miscellaneous pictures from 
the Paris Salons of the last forty years. 



RICHARD GREENOW 33 

He took them into the cerebral chamber 
where the light was better, and began to 
study them, lovingly, one by one. The 
Cezanne lithograph, the three admirable 
etchings by Van Gogh, the little Picasso 
looked on, unmoved, from the walls. 

It was three o'clock before Dick got to 
bed. He was stiff and cold, but full of the 
satisfaction of having accomplished some- 
thing. And, indeed, he had cause to be 
satisfied ; for he had written the first four 
thousand words of a novel, a chapter and 
a half of Heartsease Fitzroy : the Story of 
a Toung Girl, 

Next morning Dick looked at what he 
had written overnight, and was alarmed. 
He had never produced an^^hing quite 
like this since the days of the Quarles 
incident at ^Esop. A relapse ? He 
wondered. Not a serious one in any case ; 
for this morning he felt himself in full 
possession of all his ordinary faculties. He 
must have got overtired speaking to the 
Fabians in the evening. He looked at his 
manuscript again, and read : " 'Daddy, do 
the little girl angels in heaven have toys 
and kittens and teddy-bears ? ' 

" ' I don't know,' said Sir Christopher 
3 



34 LIMBO 

gently. ^ Why does my little one 
ask ? ' 

" ^ Because, daddy/ said the child — 
^ because I think that soon I too may be 
a little angel, and I should so like to 
have my teddy-bear with me in heaven.' 

" Sir Christopher clasped her to his 
breast. How frail she was, how ethereal, 
how nearly an angel already ! Would 
she have her teddy-bear in heaven ? 
The childish question rang in his ears. 
Great, strong man though he was, he was 
weeping. His tears fell in a rain upon 
her auburn curls. 

" ' Tell me, daddy,' she insisted, ' will 
dearest God allow me my teddy-bear ? ' 

" ' My child,' he sobbed, ' my 
child . . .'" 

The blushes mounted hot to his cheeks ; 
he turned away his head in horror. He 
would really have to look after himself 
for a bit, go to bed early, take exercise, 
not do much work. This sort of thing 
couldn't be allowed to go on. 

He went to bed at half-past nine that 
night, and woke up the following morn- 
ing to find that he had added a dozen or 
more closely written pages to his original 



RICHARD GREENOW 35 

manuscript during the night. He sup- 
posed he must have written them in 
his sleep. It was all very disquieting. 
The days passed by ; every morning a 
fresh instalment was added to the rapidly 
growing bulk of Heartsease Fitzroy. It 
was as though some goblin, some Lob-lie- 
by-the-Fire, came each night to perform 
the appointed task, vanishing before 
the morning. In a little while Dick's 
alarm wore off; during the day he was 
perfectly well ; his mind functioned 
with marvellous efficiency. It really 
didn't seem to matter what he did in his 
sleep provided he was all right in his 
waking hours. He almost forgot about 
Heartsease^ and was only reminded of 
her existence when by chance he opened 
the drawer in which the steadily growing 
pile of manuscript reposed. 

In five weeks Heartsease Fitzroy was 
finished. Dick made a parcel of the 
manuscript and sent it to a literary agent. 
He had no hopes of any publisher taking 
the thing ; but he was in sore straits for 
money [at the moment, and it seemed 
worth trying, on the off-chance. A 
fortnight later Dick received a letter 



36 LIMBO 

beginning : " Dear Madam, — Permit me 
to hail in you a new authoress of real 
talent. Heartsease Fitzroy is Great," — 
and signed " Ebor W. Sims, Editor, 
Hildebrand^s Home Weekly.''^ 

Details of the circulation of Hilde- 
brand'' s Home Weekly were printed at the 
head of the paper ; its average net sale 
was said to exceed three and a quarter 
millions. The terms offered by Mr. 
Sims seemed to Dick positively fabulous. 
And there would be the royalties on the 
thing in book form after the serial had 
run its course. 

The letter arrived at breakfast ; Dick 
cancelled all engagements for the day 
and set out immediately for a long and 
solitary walk. It was necessary to be 
alone, to think. He made his way along 
the Seven Bridges Road, up Cumnor 
Hill, through the village, and down the 
footpath to Bablock Hithe, thence to 
pursue the course of the '' stripling 
Thames " — haunted at every step by the 
Scholar Gipsy, damn him ! He drank 
beer and ate some bread and cheese in 
a little inn by a bridge, farther up 
the river ; and it was there, in the inn 



RICHilRD GREENOW 37 

parlour, surrounded by engravings of the 
late Queen, and breathing the slightly 
mouldy preserved air bottled some three 
centuries ago into that hermetically sealed 
chamber — it was there that he solved 
the problem, perceived the strange truth 
about himself. 

He was a hermaphrodite. 

A hermaphrodite, not in the gross 
obvious sense, of course, but spiritually. 
Two persons in one, male and female. 
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde : or rather a 
new William Sharp and Fiona MacLeod 
— a more intelligent William, a vulgarer 
Fiona. Everything was explained ; the 
deplorable Quarles incident was simple 
and obvious now. A sentimental young 
lady of literary tastes writing sonnets to 
her Ouida guardsman. And what an 
unerring flair Mr. Sims had shown by 
addressing him so roundly and unhesi- 
tatingly as " madam " ! 

Dick was elated at this discovery. He 
had an orderly mind that disliked 
mysteries. He had been a puzzle to 
himself for a long time ; now he was 
solved. He was not in the least distressed 
to discover this abnormality in his char- 



38 LIMBO 

acter. As long as the two parts of him 
kept well apart, as long as his male self 
could understand mathematics, and as 
long as his lady novelist's self kept up 
her regular habit of writing at night and 
retiring from business during the day, 
the arrangement would be admirable. 
The more he thought about it, the more 
it seemed an ideal state of affairs. His 
life would arrange itself so easily and well. 
He would devote the day to the dis- 
interested pursuit of knowledge, to 
philosophy and mathematics, with per- 
haps an occasional excursion into politics. 
After midnight he would write novels 
with a feminine pen, earning the money 
that would make his unproductive male 
labours possible. A kind of spiritual 
souteneur. But the fear of poverty 
need haunt him no more ; no need to 
become a wage-slave, to sacrifice his 
intelligence to the needs of his belly. 
Like a gentleman of the East, he would sit 
still and smoke his philosophic pipe while 
the womenfolk did the dirty work. Could 
anything be more satisfactory ? 

He paid for his bread and beer, and 
walked home, whistling as he went. 



RICHARD GREENOW 39 

III 

TWO months later the first instal- 
ment of Heartsease Fitzroy : the 
Story of a Toung Girl^ by Pearl 
Bellairs, appeared in the pages of Hilde- 
brancTs Home Weekly. Three and a quarter 
millions read and approved. When the 
story appeared in book form, two hundred 
thousand copies were sold in six weeks ; 
and in the course of the next two years 
no less than sixteen thousand female 
infants in London alone were christened 
Heartsease. With her fourth novel and 
her two hundred and fiftieth Sunday 
paper article, Pearl Bellairs was well on 
her way to becoming a household word. 

Meanwhile Dick was in receipt of an 
income far beyond the wildest dreams 
of his avarice. He was able to realize 
the two great ambitions of his life — to 
wear silk underclothing and to smoke 
good (but really good) cigars. 



40 LIMBO 



IV 



DICK went down from Canteloup 
in a blaze of glory. The most 
brilliant man of his generation, exceptional 
mind, prospects, career. But his head 
was not turned. When people con- 
gratulated him on his academic successes, 
he thanked them politely and then invited 
them to come and see his Memento Mori. 
His Memento Mori was called Mr. 
Glottenham and could be found at any 
hour of the day in the premises of the 
Union, or if it was evening, in the Senior 
Common Room at Canteloup. He was an 
old member of the College, and the dons 
in pity for his age and loneliness had made 
him, some years before, a member of their 
Common Room. This act of charity was 
as bitterly regretted as any generous 
impulse in the history of the world. Mr. 
Gjottenham made the life of the Cante- 
loup fellows a burden to them ; he dined 
in Hall with fiendish regularity, never miss- 
ing a night, and he was always the last to 
leave the Common Room. Mr. Glotten- 
ham did not prepossess at a first glance ; 



RICHARD GREENOW 41 

the furrows of his face were covered with 
a short grey sordid stubble ; his clothes 
were disgusting with the spilth of many 
years of dirty feeding ; he had the 
shoulders and long hanging arms of an 
ape — an ape with a horribly human look 
about it. When he spoke, it was like the 
sound of a man breaking coke ; he spoke 
incessantly and on every subjcrt. His 
knowledge was enormous ; but Le pos- 
sessed the secret of a strange inverted 
alchemy — he knew how^ to turn the 
richest gold to lead, could make the most 
interesting topic so intolerably tedious 
that it was impossible, when he talked, 
not to loathe it. 

This was the death's-head to which 
Dick, like an ancient philosopher at a 
banquet, would direct the attention of his 
heartiest congratulators. Mr. Glotten- 
ham had had the most dazzling academic 
career of his generation. His tutors had 
prophesied for him a future far more 
brilliant than that of any of his con- 
temporaries. They were now Ministers 
of State, poets, philosophers, judges, 
millionaires. Mr. Glottenham fre- 
quented the Union and the Canteloup 



/ 

/ 



42 LIMBO 

Senior Common Room, and was — well, 
he was just Mr. Glottenham. Which 
was why Dick did not think too highly 
of his own laurels. 



WHAT shall I do ? What ought I 
to do? " Dick walked up and 
down tlie room smoking, furiously and 
without at all savouring its richness, one 
of his opulent cigars. 

" My dear," said Cravister — for it was 
in Cravister's high-ceilinged Bloomsbury 
room that Dick was thus unveiling his 
distress of spirit — " my dear, this isn't a 
revival meeting. You speak as though 
there were an urgent need for your soul 
to be saved from hell fire. It's not as bad 
as that, you know." 

" But it is a revival meeting," Dick 
shouted in exasperation — " it is. Vm a 
revivalist. You don't know what it's like 
to have a feeling about your soul. I'm 
terrifyingly earnest ; you don't seem to 
understand that. I have all the feelings 
of Bunyan without his religion. I regard 
the salvation of my soul as important. 



RICHARD GREENOW 43 

How simple ever\i:hing would be if one 
could go out with those creatures in 
bonnets and sing hymns like, ' Hip, hip for 
the blood of the Lamb, hurrah ! ' or that 
exquisite one : 

" * The bells of Hell ring tingalingaling 
For you, but not for me. 
For me the angels singalingaling ; 
They've got the goods for me.' 

Unhappily it's impossible." 

" Your ideas," said Cravister in his 
flutiest voice, '^ are somewhat Gothic. I 
think I can understand them, though of 
course I don't sympathize or approve. 
My advice to people in doubt about what 
course of action they ought to pursue is 
always the same : do what you want to." 

" Cravister, you're hopeless," said Dick, 
laughing. " I suppose I am rather Gothic, 
but I do feel sometimes that the question 
of ought as well as of want does arise." 

Dick had come to his old friend for 
advice about Life. What ought he to do ? 
The indefatigable pen of Pearl Bellairs 
solved for him the financial problem. 
There remained only the moral problem : 
how could he best expend his energies and 



44 LIMBO 

his time ? Should he devote himself to 
knowing or doing, philosophy or politics ? 
He felt in himself the desire to search for 
truth and the ability — who knows ? — to 
find it. On the other hand, the horrors 
of the world about him seemed to call on 
him to put forth all his strength in an 
effort to ameliorate what was so patently 
and repulsively bad. Actually, what had 
to be decided was this : Should he devote 
himself to the researches necessary to carry 
out the plan, long ripening in his brain, 
of a new system of scientific philosophy ; 
or should he devote his powers and Pearl 
Bellairs' money in propaganda that should 
put life into the English revolutionary 
movement ? Great moral principles were 
in the balance. And Cravister's advice 
was, do what you want to ! 

After a month of painful indecision, 
Dick, who was a real Englishman, arrived 
at a satisfactory compromise. He started 
work on his new Synthetic Philosophy, 
and at the same time joined the staff of 
the Weekly International^ to which he 
contributed both money and articles. 
The weeks slipped pleasantly and profitably 
along. The secret of happiness lies in 



RICHARD GREENOW 45 

congenial work, and no one could have 
worked harder than Dick, unless it was the 
indefatigable Pearl Bellairs, whose nightly 
output of five thousand words sufficed to 
support not only Dick but the Weekly 
International as well. These months were 
perhaps the happiest period of Dick's life. 
He had friends, money, liberty ; he knew 
himself to be working well ; and it was an 
extra, a supererogatory happiness that he 
began at this time to get on much better 
wdth his sister Millicent than he had ever 
done before. Millicent had come up to 
Oxford as a student at St. Mungo Hall in 
Dick's third year. She had grown into a 
very efficient and very intelligent young 
woman. A particularly handsome young 
woman as well. She was boyishly slender, 
and a natural grace kept on breaking 
through the somewhat rigid deportment, 
which she always tried to impose upon 
herself, in little beautiful gestures and 
movements that made the onlooker catch 
his breath with astonished pleasure. 

" Wincing she was as is a jolly colt, 
Straight as a mast and upright as a bolt : " 

Chaucer had as good an eye for youthful 



46 LIMBO 

grace as for mormals and bristly nostrils 
and thick red jovial villainousness. 

Millicent lost no time in making her 
presence at St. Mungo's felt. Second- and 
third-year heroines might snort at the 
forwardness of a mere fresh-girl, might 
resent the complete absence of veneration 
for their glory exhibited by this youthful 
bejauna ; Millicent pursued her course 
unmoved. She founded new societies and 
put fresh life into the institutions which 
already existed at St. Mungo's to take 
cocoa and discuss the problems of the 
universe. She played hockey like a 
tornado, and she worked alarmingly hard. 
Decidedly, Millicent was a Force, very 
soon the biggest Force in the St. Mungo 
world. In her fifth term she organized 
the famous St. Mungo general strike, 
which compelled the authorities to relax 
a few of the more intolerably tyrannical 
and anachronistic rules restricting the 
liberty of the students. It was she who 
went, on behalf of the strikers, to interview 
the redoubtable Miss Prosser, Principal 
of St. Mungo's. The redoubtable Miss 
Prosser looked grim and invited her to sit 
down. Millicent sat down and, without 



RICHARD GREENOW 47 

quailing, delivered a short but pointed 
speech attacking the fundamental prin- 
ciples of the St. Mungo system of discipline. 

" Your whole point of view," she 
assured Miss Prosser, " is radically wrong. 
It's an insult to the female sex ; it's 
positively obscene. Your root assump- 
tion is simply this : that we're all in a 
chronic state of sexual excitement ; 
leave us alone for a moment and we'll 
immediately put our desires into practice. 
It's disgusting. It makes me blush. 
After all. Miss Prosser, we are a college 
of intelligent women, not an asylum of 
nymphomaniacs." 

For the first time in her career, Miss 
Prosser had to admit herself beaten. The 
authorities gave in — reluctantly and on 
only a few points ; but the principle 
had been shaken, and that, as Millicent 
pointed out, was what really mattered. 

Dick used to see a good deal of his 
sister while he was still in residence at 
Canteloup, and after he had gone down 
he used to come regularly once a fort- 
night during term to visit her. That 
horrible mutual reserve, which poisons 
the social life of most families and which 



48 LIMBO 

had effectively made of their brotherly 
and sisterly relation a prolonged dis- 
comfort in the past, began to disappear. 
They became the best of friends. 

" I like you, Dick, a great deal better 
than I did," said Millicent one day as 
they were parting at the gate of St. 
Mungo's after a long walk together. 

Dick took off his hat and bowed. " My 
dear, I reciprocate the sentiment. And, 
what's more, I esteem and admire you. 
So there." 

Millicent curtsied, and they laughed. 
They both felt very happy. 

VI 

WHAT a life ! " said Dick, with a 
sigh of weariness as the train 
moved out of Euston. 

Not a bad Hfe, MilHcent thought. 

" But horribly fatiguing. I am quite 
out reined by it." 

" Outreined " was Dick's translation 
of ereintS. He liked using words of his 
own manufacture ; one had to learn 
his idiom before one could properly 
appreciate his intimate conversation. 



RICHARD GREENOW 49 

Dick had every justification for being 
outreined. The spring and summer had 
passed for him in a whirl of incessant 
activity. He had written three long 
chapters of the New Synthetic Philosophy^ 
and had the material for two more ready 
in the form of notes. He had helped to 
organize and bring to its successful con- 
clusion the great carpenters' strike of 
May and June. He had written four 
pamphlets and a small army of political 
articles. And this comprised only half 
his labour ; for nightly, from twelve till 
two, Pearl Bellairs emerged to compose 
the masterpieces which supplied Dick with 
his bread and butter. A^pes in Purple 
had been published in May. Since then 
she had finished La Belle Dame sans 
Morality^ and had embarked on the first 
chapters of Daisy's Voyage to Cythera. 
Her weekly articles, " For the Girls of 
Britain/' had become, during this period, 
a regular and favourite feature in the 
pages of Hildebrand^s Sabbath^ that prince 
of Sunday papers. At the beginning 
of July, Dick considered that he had 
earned a holiday, and now they were 
off, he and Millicent, for the North. 



50 LIMBO 

Dick had taken a cottage on the shore 
of one of those long salt-water lochs 
that give to the west coast of Scotland 
such a dissipated appearance on the map. 
For miles around there was not a living 
soul who did not bear the name of 
Campbell — two families only excepted, 
one of whom was called Murray- 
Drummond and the other Drummond- 
Murray. However, it was not for the 
people that Dick and Millicent had come, 
so much as for the landscape, which 
made up in variety for anything that 
the inhabitants might lack. Behind the 
cottage, in the midst of a narrow strip 
of bog lying between the loch and the 
foot of the mountains, stood one of the 
numerous tombs of Ossian, a great 
barrow of ancient stones. And a couple 
of miles away the remains of Deirdre's 
Scottish refuge bore witness to the Celtic 
past. The countryside was dotted with 
the black skeletons of mediaeval castles. 
Astonishing country, convulsed into 
fantastic mountain shapes, cut and in- 
dented by winding fiords. On summer 
days the whole of this improbable 
landscape became blue and remote and 



RICHARD GREENOW 51 

aerially transparent. Its beauty lacked 
all verisimilitude. It was for that reason 
that Dick chose the neighbourhood for 
his holidays. After the insistent actuality 
of London this frankly unreal coast was 
particularly refreshing to a jaded spirit. 

'' Nous sommes ici en plein roman- 
tisme," said Dick on the day of their 
arrival, making a comprehensive gesture 
towards the dream-like scenery, and for 
the rest of his holiday he acted the part 
of a young romantic of the palmy period. 
He sat at the foot of Ossian's tomb and 
read Lamartine ; he declaimed BjTon 
from the summit of the mountains and 
Shelley as he rowed along the loch. In 
the evening he read George Sand's 
Indiana ; he agonized with the pure, 
but passionate, heroine, while his ad- 
miration for Sir Brown, her English lover, 
the impassive giant who never speaks and 
is always clothed in faultless hunting 
costume, knew no bounds. He saturated 
himself in the verses of Victor Hugo, and 
at last almost came to persuade himself 
that the words, Dieu. i7ifinite. eternite^ 
wdth which the works of that deplorable 
genius are so profusely sprinkled, actu- 



52 LIMBO 

ally possessed some meaning, though what 
that meaning was he could not, even in 
his most romantic transports, discover. 
Pearl Bellairs, of course, understood quite 
clearly their significance, and though 
she was a very poor French scholar she 
used sometimes to be moved almost to 
tears by the books she found lying about 
when she came into existence after mid- 
night. She even copied out extracts into 
her notebooks with a view to using them 
in her next novel. 

" Les plus desesperes sont les chants les plus beaux, 
Et j'en sais d'immortels qui sont de purs sanglots," 

was a couplet which struck her as sublime. 

Millicent, meanwhile, did the house- 
keeping with extraordinary efficiency, took 
a great deal of exercise, and read long, 
serious books ; she humoured her brother 
in his holiday romanticism, but refused 
to take part in the game. 

The declaration of war took them 
completely by surprise. It is true that 
a Scotsman found its way into the cottage 
by about lunch-time every day, but it 
was never read, and served only to light 
fires and wrap up fish and things of that 



RICHARD GREENOW 53 

sort. No letters were being forwarded, 
for they had left no address ; they were 
isolated from the world. On the fatal 
morning Dick had, indeed, glanced at 
the paper, without however noticing 
anything out of the ordinary. It was 
only later when, alarmed by the rumours 
floating round the village shop, he came 
to examine his Scotsman more closely, 
that he found about half-way down the 
third column of one of the middle pages 
an admirable account of all that had been 
so tragically happening in the last twenty- 
four hours ; he learnt with horror that 
Europe was at wai* and that his country 
too had entered the arena. Even in the 
midst of his anguish of spirit he could 
not help admiring the Scotsman's splendid 
impassivity — no headlines, no ruffling of 
the traditional aristocratic dignity. Like 
Sir Rodolphe Brown in Indiana^ he 
thought, with a sickly smile. 

Dick determined to start for London at 
once. He felt that he must act, or at 
least create the illusion of action ; he 
could not stay quietly where he was. It 
was arranged that he should set out that 
afternoon, while Millicent should follow 



54 LIMBO 

a day or two later with the bulk of the 
luggage. The train which took him to 
Glasgow was slower than he thought it 
possible for any train to be. He tried 
to read, he tried to sleep ; it was no 
good. His nervous agitation was piti- 
able ; he made little involuntary move- 
ments with his limbs, and every now and 
then the muscles of his face began twitch- 
ing in a spasmodic and uncontrollable 
tic. There were three hours to wait in 
Glasgow ; he spent them in wandering 
about the streets. In the interminable 
summer twilight the inhabitants of 
Glasgow came forth into the open to 
amuse themselves ; the sight almost 
made him sick. Was it possible that 
there should be human beings so numerous 
and so uniformly hideous ? Small, de- 
formed, sallow, they seemed malignantly 
ugly, as if on purpose. The w^ords they 
spoke were incomprehensible. He shud- 
dered ; it was an alien place — it was hell. 
The London train was crammed. 
Three gross Italians got into Dick's car- 
riage, and after they had drunk and eaten 
with loud, unpleasant gusto, they prepared 
themselves for sleep by taking off their 



RICHARD GREENOW 55 

boots. Their feet smelt strongly am- 
moniac, like a cage of mice long uncleaned. 
Acutely awake, while the other occupants 
of the compartment enjoyed a happy 
unconsciousness, he looked at the huddled 
carcasses that surrounded him. The 
warmth and the smell of them was suffo- 
cating, and there came to his mind, with 
the nightmarish insistence of a fixed idea, 
the thought that every breath they ex- 
haled was saturated with disease. To 
be condemned to sit in a hot bath of 
consumption and syphilis — it was too 
horrible ! The moment came at last 
when he could bear it no longer ; he got 
up and went into the corridor. Standing 
there, or sitting sometimes for a few 
dreary minutes in the lavatory, he passed 
the rest of the night. The train roared 
along without a stop. The roaring be- 
came articulate : in the days of his child- 
hood trains used to run to the tune of 
" Lancashire, to Lancashire, to fetch a 
pocket-handkercher ; to Lancashire, to 
Lancashire . . ." But to-night the 
wheels were shouting insistently, a million 
times over, two words only — " the War, 
the War ; the War, the War." He tried 



S6 LIMBO 

desperately to make them say something 
else, but they refused to recite Milton ; 
they refused to go to Lancashire ; they 
went on with their endless Tibetanlitany — 
the War, the War, the War. 

By the time he reached London, Dick 
was in a wretched state. His nerves were 
twittering and jumping within him ; he 
felt like a walking aviary. The tic in his 
face had become more violent and per- 
sistent. As he stood in the station, 
waiting for a cab, he overheard a small 
child saying to its mother, " What's the 
matter with that man's face, mother ? " 

" Sh — sh, darling," was the reply. 
" It's rude." 

Dick turned and saw the child's big 
round eyes fixed with fascinated curiosity 
upon him, as though he were a kind of 
monster. He put his hand to his fore- 
head and tried to stop the twitching of the 
muscles beneath the skin. It pained him 
to think that he had become a scarecrow 
for children. 

Arrived at his flat, Dick drank a glass of 
brandy and lay down for a rest. He felt 
exhausted — ill. At half-past one he got 
up, drank some more brandy, and crept 



RICHARD GREENOW 57 

down into the street. It was intensely- 
hot ; the pavements reverberated the 
sunlight in a glare which hurt his eyes ; 
they seemed to be in a state of grey in- 
candescence. A nauseating smell of wetted 
dust rose from the roadway, along which 
a water-cart was slowly piddling its way. 
He realized suddenly that he ought not to 
have drunk all that brandy on an empty 
stomach ; he was definitely rather tipsy. 
He had arrived at that state of drunkenness 
when the senses perceive things clearly, 
but do not transmit their knowledge to the 
understanding. He was painfully con- 
scious of this division, and it needed all 
the power of his will to establish contact 
between his parted faculties. It was as 
though he were, by a great and prolonged 
effort, keeping his brain pressed against 
the back of his eyes ; as soon as he relaxed 
the pressure, the understanding part 
slipped back, the contact was broken, 
and he relapsed into a state bordering 
on imbecility. The actions which ordin- 
arily one does by habit and without think- 
ing, he had to perform consciously and 
voluntarily. He had to reason out the 
problem of walking — first the left foot 



58 LIMBO 

forward, then the right. How ingeni- 
ously he worked his ankles and knees and 
hips ! How delicately the thighs slid 
past one another ! 

He found a restaurant and sat there 
drinking coffee and trying to eat an omel- 
ette until he felt quite sober. Then he 
drove to the offices of the Weekly Inter- 
national to have a talk with Hyman, the 
editor. Hyman was sitting in his shirt- 
sleeves, writing. 

He lifted his head as Dick came in. 
" Greenow," he shouted delightedly, 
" we were all wondering what had become 
of you. We thought you'd joined the 
Army." 

Dick shook his head, but did not speak : 
the hot stuffy smell of printer's ink and 
machinery combined with the atrocious 
reek of Hyman's Virginian cigarettes to 
make him feel rather faint. He sat down 
on the window-ledge, so as to be able to 
breathe an uncontaminated air. 

'' Well," he said at last, " what about 
it ? " 

" It's going to be hell." 

" Did you suppose I thought it was 
going to be paradise ? " Dick replied irri- 



RICHARD GREENOW 59 

tably. " Internationalism looks rather 
funny now, doesn't it ? " 

" I believe in it more than ever I did," 
cried Hyman. His face lit up with the 
fervour of his enthusiasm. It was a fine 
face, gaunt, furrowed, and angular, for all 
that he was barely thirty, looking as though 
it had been boldly chiselled from some 
hard stone. " The rest of the world may 
go mad ; we'll try and keep our sanity. 
The time will come when they'll see we 
were right." 

Hyman talked on. His passionate sin- 
cerity and singleness of purpose were an 
inspiration to Dick. He had always 
admired Hyman — with the reservations, 
of course, that the man was rather a 
fanatic and not so well-educated as he 
might have been — but to-day he admired 
him more than ever. He was even moved 
by that perhaps too facile eloquence 
which of old had been used to leave him 
cold. After promising to do a series of 
articles on international relations for the 
paper, Dick went home, feeling better 
than he had done all day. 

He decided that he would begin writing 
his articles at once. He collected pens, 



6o LIMBO 

paper, and ink and sat down in a business- 
like way at his bureau. He remembered 
distinctly biting the tip of his pen- 
holder ; it tasted rather bitter. 

And then he realized he was standing in 
Regent Street, looking in at one of the 
windows of Liberty's. 

For a long time he stood there quite 
still, absorbed to all appearance in the 
contemplation of a piece of peacock-blue 
fabric. But all his attention was concen- 
trated within himself, not on anything 
outside. He was wondering — wondering 
how it came about that he was sitting at 
his writing-table at one moment, and 
standing, at the next, in Regent Street. 
He hadn't — the thought flashed upon him 
— he hadn't been drinking any more of 
that brandy, had he ? No, he felt himself 
to be perfectly sober. He moved slowly 
away and continued to speculate as he 
walked. 

At Oxford Circus he bought an evening 
paper. He almost screamed aloud when 
he saw that the date printed at the head 
of the page was August 12th. It was on 
August 7th that he had sat down at his 
writing-table to compose those articles. 



RICHARD GREENOW 6i 

Five days ago, and he had not the 
faintest recollection of what had happened 
in those five days. 

He made all haste back to the flat. 
Everything was in perfect order. He had 
evidently had a picnic lunch that morning 
— sardines, bread and jam, and raisins ; 
the remains of it still covered the table. 
He opened the sideboard and took out the 
brandy bottle. Better make quite sure. 
He held it up to the light ; it was miore 
than three-quarters full. Not a drop had 
gone since the day of his return. If 
brandy wasn't the cause, then what was ? 

As he sat there thinking, he began in 
an absent-minded way to look at his 
evening paper. He read the news on 
the front page, then turned to the inner 
sheets. His eye fell on these words 
printed at the head of the column next 
the leading article : 

" To the Women of the Empire. 
Thoughts in War-Time . By Pearl 
Bellairs." Underneath in brackets : 
" The first of a series of inspiring patriotic 
articles by Miss Bellairs, the well-known 
novelist." 

Dick groaned in agony. He saw in a 



62 LIMBO 

flash what had happened to his five 
missing days. Pearl had got hold of 
them somehow, had trespassed upon his 
life out of her own reserved nocturnal 
existence. She had taken advantage of 
his agitated mental state to have a little 
fun in her own horrible way. 

He picked up the paper once more and 
began to read Pearl's article. " In- 
spiring and patriotic " : those were 
feeble words in which to describe Pearl's 
shrilly raucous chauvinism. And the 
style ! Christ ! to think that he was 
responsible, at least in part, for this. 
Responsible, for had not the words been 
written by his own hand and composed 
in some horrible bluebeard's chamber 
of his own brain ? They had, there 
was no denying it. Pearl's literary 
atrocities had never much distressed 
him ; he had long given up reading 
a word she wrote. Her bank balance 
was the only thing about her that inter- 
ested him. But now she was invading 
the sanctities of his private life. She was 
trampling on his dearest convictions, 
denying his faith. She was a public 
danger. It was all too frightful. 



RICHARD GREENOW 63 

He passed the afternoon in misery. 
Suicide or brandy seemed the only 
cures. Not very satisfactory ones, though. 
Towards evening an illuminating idea 
occurred to him. He would go and see 
Rogers. Rogers knew all about psy- 
chology — from books, at any rate : Freud, 
Jung, Morton Prince, and people like 
that. He used to try hypnotic experi- 
ments on his friends and even dabbled in 
amateur psychotherapy. Rogers might 
help him to lay the ghost of Pearl. He 
ate a hasty dinner and went to see Rogers 
in his Kensington rooms. 

Rogers was sitting at a table with a 
great book open in front of him. The 
reading-lamp, which was the only light 
in the room, brightly illumined one side 
of the pallid, puffy, spectacled face, 
leaving the other in complete darkness, 
save for a little cedilla of golden light 
caught on the fold of flesh at the corner 
of his mouth. His huge shadow crossed 
the floor, began to climb the wall, and 
from the shoulders upwards mingled 
itself with the general darkness of the 
room. 

'' Good evening, Rogers," said Dick 



64 LIMBO 

wearily. " I wish you wouldn't try 
and look like Rembrandt's ' Christ at 
Emmaus ' with these spectacular chiar- 
oscuro effects." 

Rogers gave vent to his usual nervous 
giggling laugh. " This is very nice of 
you to come and see me, Greenow." 

" How's the Board of Trade ? " 
Rogers was a Civil Servant by profession. 

" Oh, business as usual, as the Daily 
Mail would say." Rogers laughed again 
as though he had made a joke. 

After a little talk of things indifferent, 
Dick brought the conversation round to 
himself. 

" I believe I'm getting a bit neuras- 
thenic," he said. " Fits of depression, 
nervous pains, lassitude, anaemia of the 
will. I've come to you for professional 
advice. I want you to nose out my sup- 
pressed complexes, analyse me, dissect me. 
Will you do that for me ? " 

Rogers was evidently delighted. " I'll 
do my best," he said, with assumed 
modesty. " But I'm no good at the thing, 
so you mustn't expect much." 

" I'm at your disposal," said Dick. 

Rogers placed his guest in a large arm- 



RICHARD GREENOW 65 

chair. ^' Relax your muscles and think 
of nothing at all." Dick sat there flabby 
and abstracted while Rogers made his 
preparations. His apparatus consisted 
chiefly in a notebook and a stop-watch. 
He seated himself at the table. 

'' Now." he said solemnly, " I want 
you to listen to me. I propose to read 
out a list of words ; after each of the words 
you must say the first word that comes 
into your head. The very first, mind, 
however foolish it may seem. And say it 
as soon as it crosses your mind ; don't 
wait to think. I shall write down your 
answers and take the time between 
each question and reply." 

Rogers cleared his throat and started. 

" Mother," he said in a loud, clear 
voice. He always began his analyses 
with the family. For since the majority 
of kinks and complexes date from child- 
hood, it is instructive to investigate the 
relations between the patient and those 
who surrounded him at an early age. 
" Mother." 

" Dead," replied Dick immediately. 
He had scarcely known his mother. 

" Father." 



66 LIMBO 

" Dull/' One and a fifth seconds' 
interval. 

" Sister/' Rogers pricked his ears for 
the reply : his favourite incest-theory 
depended on it. 

" Fabian Society," said Dick, after two 
seconds' interval. Rogers was a little 
disappointed. He was agreeably thrilled 
and excited by the answer he received to 
his next word : " Aunt." 

The seconds passed, bringing nothing 
with them ; and then at last there floated 
into Dick's mind the image of himself as 
a child, dressed in green velvet and lace, 
a perfect Bubbles boy, kneeling on Auntie 
Loo's lap and arranging a troop of lead 
soldiers on the horizontal projection of 
her corsage. 

" Bosom," he said. 

Rogers wrote down the word and under- 
lined it. Six and three-fifths seconds : 
very significant. He turned now to the 
chapter of possible accidents productive 
of nervous shocks. 

" Fire." 

" Coal." 

" Sea." 

" Sick/^ 



RICHARD GREENOW 67 

'' Train." 

" Smell." 

And so on. Dull answers all the 
time. Evidently, nothing very cata- 
strophic had ever happened to him. 
Now for a frontal attack on the fortress 
of sex itself. 

" Women." There was rather a long 
pause, four seconds, and then Dick 
replied, " Novelist." Rogers was 
puzzled. 

" Breast." 

'' Chicken." That was disappointing. 
Rogers could find no trace of those 
sinister moral censors, expurgators of 
impulse, suppressors of happiness. Per- 
haps the trouble lay in religion. 

" Christ," he said. 

Dick replied, " Amen," with the 
promptitude of a parish clerk. 

" God." ^ 

Dick's mind remained a perfect blank. 
The word seemed to convey to him 
nothing at all. God, God. After a 
long time there appeared before his 
inward eye the face of a boy he had 
known at school and at Oxford, one 
Godfrey Wilkinson, called God for short. 



68 LIMBO 

" Wilkinson.'' Ten seconds and a 
fifth. 

A few more miscellaneous questions, 
and the list was exhausted. Almost 
suddenly, Dick fell into a kind of hypnotic 
sleep. Rogers sat pensive in front of 
his notes ; sometimes he consulted a 
text-book. At the end of half an hour 
he awakened Dick to tell him that he 
had had, as a child, consciously or un- 
consciously, a great Freudian passion 
for his aunt ; that later on he had had 
another passion, almost religious in its 
fervour and intensity, for somebody 
called Wilkinson ; and that the cause of all 
his present troubles lay in one or other of 
these episodes. If he liked, he (Rogers) 
would investigate the matter further with 
a view to establishing a cure. 

Dick thanked him very much, thought 
it wasn't worth taking any more trouble, 
and went home. 

VII 

MILLICENT was organizing a 
hospital supply depot, organiz- 
ing indefatigably, from morning till night. 
It was October : Dick had not seen his 



RICHARD GREENOW 69 

sister since those first hours of the war in 
Scotland ; he had had too much to think 
about these last months to pay attention 
to anyone but himself. To-day, at last, 
he decided that he would go and pay her a 
visit. Millicent had commandeered a large 
house in Kensington from a family of Jews, 
who were anxious to live down a deplorable 
name by a display of patriotism. Dick 
found her sitting there in her office — 
young, formidable, beautiful, severe — at a 
big desk covered with papers. 

" Well," said Dick, '' you're winning the 
war, I see." 

" You, I gather, are not," Millicent 
replied. 

" I believe in the things I always 
believed in." 

" So do I." ^ 

" But in a different way, my dear — in a 
different way," said Dick sadly. There 
was a silence. 

" Had we better quarrel ? " Millicent 
asked meditatively. 

" I think we can manage with nothing 
worse than a coolness — for the duration." 

" Very well, a coolness." 

" A smouldering coolness." 



70 LIMBO 

" Good," said Millicent briskly. " Let 
it start smouldering at once I must get 
on with my work. Good-bye, Dick. God 
bless you. Let me know sometimes how 
you get on." 

" No need to ask how you get on," said 
Dick with a smile, as he shook her hand. 
" I know by experience that you always 
get on, only too well, ruthlessly well." 

He went out. Millicent returned to her 
letters with concentrated ardour ; a frown 
puckered the skin between her eyebrows. 

Probably, Dick reflected as he made his 
way down the stairs, he wouldn't see her 
again for a year or so. He couldn't 
honestly say that it affected him much. 
Other people became daily more and more 
like ghosts, unreal, thin, vaporous ; while 
every hour the consciousness of himself 
grew more intense and all-absorbing. 
The only person who was more than a 
shadow to him now was Hyman of the 
Weekly International. In those first 
horrible months of the war, when he was 
wrestling with Pearl Bellairs and faihng to 
cast her out, it was Hyman who kept him 
from melancholy and suicide. Hyman 
made him write a long article every week. 



RICHARD GREENOW 71 

dragged him into the office to do sub- 
editorial work, kept him so busy that there 
were long hours when he had no time to 
brood over his own insoluble problems. 
And his enthusiasm was so passionate and 
sincere that sometimes even Dick was 
infected by it ; he could believe that life 
was worth living and the cause worth 
fighting for. But not for long ; for the 
devil would return, insistent and untiring. 
Pearl Bellairs was greedy for life ; she was 
not content with her short midnight hours ; 
she wanted the freedom of whole days. 
And whenever Dick was overtired, or ill or 
nervous, she leapt upon him and stamped 
him out of existence, till enough strength 
came back for him to reassert his person- 
ality. And the articles she wrote ! The 
short stories ! The recruiting songs ! 
Dick dared not read them ; they were 
terrible, terrible. 

VIII 

THE months passed by. The longer 
the war lasted, the longer it seemed 
likely to last. Dick supported life some- 
how. Then came the menace of conscrip- 



72 LIMBO 

tion. The Weekly International organized 
a great anti-conscription campaign, in 
which Hyman and Dick were the leading 
spirits. Dick was almost happy. This 
kind of active work was new to him and 
he enjoyed it, finding it exciting and at 
the same time sedative. For a self-ab- 
sorbed and brooding mind, pain itself is 
an anodyne. He enjoyed his incessant 
journeys, his speechmaking to queer 
audiences in obscure halls and chapels ; 
he liked talking with earnest members of 
impossible Christian sects, pacifists who 
took not the faintest interest in the v/elfare 
of humanity at large, but were wholly 
absorbed in the salvation of their own 
souls and in keeping their consciences clear 
from the faintest trace of blood-guiltiness. 
He enjoyed the sense of power which came 
to him, when he roused the passion of the 
crowd to enthusiastic assent, or breasted 
the storm of antagonism. He enjoyed 
everything — even getting a bloody nose 
from a patriot hired and intoxicated by a 
great evening paper to break up one of his 
meetings. It all seemed tremendously 
exciting and important at the time. And 
yet when, in quiet moments, he came 



RICHARD GREENOW 73 

to look back on his days of activity, they 
seemed utterly empty and futile. What 
was left of them ? Nothing, nothing at 
all. The momentary intoxication had 
died away, the stirred ant's-nest had gone 
back to normal life. Futility of action ! 
There was nothing permanent, or decent, 
or w^orth while, except thought. And of 
that he was almost incapable now. His 
mind, when it was not occupied by the 
immediate and actual, turned inward 
morbidly upon itself. He looked at the 
manuscript of his book and wondered 
whether he would ever be able to go on 
with it. It seemed doubtful. Was he, 
then, condemned to pass the rest of his 
existence enslaved to the beastliness and 
futiUty of mere quotidian action ? And 
even in action his powers were limited ; 
if he exerted himself too much — and the 
limits of fatigue were soon reached — 
Pearl Bellairs, watching perpetually like a 
hungry tigress for her opportunity, leapt 
upon him and took possession of his 
conscious faculties. And then, it might 
be for a matter of hours or of days, he was 
lost, blotted off the register of living souls, 
while she performed, with intense and 



74 LIMBO 

hideous industry, her self-appointed task. 
More than once his anti-conscription 
campaigns had been cut short and he him- 
self had suddenly disappeared from public 
life, to return with the vaguest stories of 
illness or private affairs — stories that 
made his friends shake their heads and 
wonder which it was among the noble 
army of vices that poor Dick Greenow was 
so mysteriously addicted to. Some said 
drink, some said women, some said opium, 
and some hinted at things infinitely darker 
and more horrid. Hyman asked him 
point-blank what it was, one morning 
when he had returned to the office after 
three days' unaccountable absence. 

Dick blushed painfully. " It isn't any- 
thing you think," he said. 

" What is it, then ? " Hyman insisted. 

" I can't tell you," Dick replied desper- 
ately and in torture, " but I swear it's 
nothing discreditable. I beg you won't 
ask me any more." 

Hyman had to pretend to be satisfied 
with that. 



A 



RICHARD GREENOW 75 

IX 

TACTICAL move in the anti- 
conscription campaign was the 
foundation of a club, a place where people 
with pacific or generally advanced ideas 
could congregate. 

" A club like this would soon be the 
intellectual centre of London," said 
Hyman, ever sanguine. 

Dick shrugged his shoulders. He had 
a wide experience of pacifists. 

" If you bring people together," 
Hyman went on, " they encourage one 
another to be bold — strengthen one 
another's faith." 

" Yes," said Dick dyspeptically. 
" When they're in a herd, they can 
believe that they're much more numer- 
ous and important than they really 
are." 

" But, man, they are numerous, they 
are important ! " Hyman shouted and 
gesticulated. 

Dick allowed himself to be persuaded 
into an optimism which he knew to be 
ill-founded. The consolations of religion 



76 LIMBO 

do not console the less efficaciously for 
being illusory. 

It was a longtime before they could think 
of a suitable name for their club. Dick 
suggested that it should be called the 
Sclopis Club. " Such a lovely name/' he 
explained. " Sclopis — Sclopis ; it tastes 
precious in the mouth." But the rest of 
the committee would not hear of it ; 
they wanted a name that meant some- 
thing. Oneladysuggestedthat it should be 
called the Everyman Club ; Dick objected 
with passion. " It makes one shudder," 
he said. The lady thought it was a 
beautiful and uplifting name, but as Mr. 
Greenow was so strongly opposed, she 
wouldn't press the claims of Everyman. 
Hyman wanted to call it the Pacifist 
Club, but that was judged too provocative. 
Finally, they agreed to call it the Nov- 
embrist Club, because it was November 
and they could think of no better title. 

The inaugural dinner of the Novem- 
brist Club was held at Piccolomini's 
Restaurant. Piccolomini is in, but not 
exactly of, Soho, for it is a cross between 
a Soho restaurant and a Corner House, a 
hybrid which combines the worst quali- 



RICHARD GREENOW 77 

ties of both parents — the dirt and in- 
efficiency of Soho, the size and vulgarity of 
Lyons. There is a large upper chamber 
reserved for agapes. Here, one wet and 
dismal winter's evening, the Novembrists 
assembled. 

Dick arrived early, and from his place 
near the door he watched his fellow- 
members come in. He didn't much like 
the look of them. " Middle class " was 
what he found himself thinking ; and he 
had to admit, when his conscience re- 
proached him for it, that he did not like 
the middle classes, the lower middle classes, 
the lower classes. He was, there was no 
denying it, a bloodsucker at heart — 
cultured and intelligent, perhaps, but a 
bloodsucker none the less. 

The meal began. Everything about it 
was profoundly suspect. The spoons were 
made of some pale pinchbeck metal, very 
light and flimsy; one expected them to 
melt in the soup, or one would have done, if 
the soup had been even tepid. The food 
was thick and greasy. Dick wondered 
what it really looked like under the con- 
cealing sauces. The wine left an inde- 
scribable taste that lingered on the palate, 



78 LIMBO 

like the savour of brass or of charcoal 
fumes. 

From childhood upwards Dick had 
suffered from the intensity of his visceral 
reactions to emotion. Fear and shyness 
were apt to make him feel very sick, 
and disgust produced in him a sensation 
of intolerable queasiness. Disgust had 
seized upon his mind to-night. He grew^ 
paler v^ith the arrival of every dish, and the 
v^ine, instead of cheering him, made him 
feel much v^orse. His neighbours to 
right and left ate with revolting heartiness. 
On one side sat Miss Gibbs, garishly 
dressed in ill-assorted colours that might 
be called futuristic ; on the other was Mr. 
Somiething in pince-nez, rather ambrosial 
about the hair. Mr. Something was a 
poet, or so the man who introduced 
them had said. Miss Gibbs was just an 
ordinary member of the Intelligentsia, 
like the rest of us. 

The Lower Classes, the Lower Classes . . . 

" Are you interested in the Modern 
Theatre .^ " asked Mr. Something in his 
mellow voice. Too mellow — oh, much 
too mellow ! 

" Passably," said Dick. 



RICHARD GREENOW 79 

" So am I," said Mr. Thingummy. " I 
am a vice-president of the Craftsmen's 
League of Joy, which perhaps you may 
have heard of." 

Dick shook his head ; this v^as going to 
be terrible. 

" The objects of the Craftsmen's 
League of Joy," Mr. Thingummy con- 
tinued, " or rather, one of the objects — 
for it has many — is to estabHsh Little 
Theatres in every town and village in 
England, where simple, uplifting, beautiful 
plays might be acted. The people have 
no joy." 

'' They have the cinema and the music 
hall," said Dick. He was filled with a 
sudden senseless irritation. " They get 
all the joy they want out of the jokes of the 
comics and the legs of the women." 

" Ah, but that is an impure joy," Mr. 
What's-his-name protested. 

'' Impure purple, Herbert Spenser's 
favourite colour," flashed irrelevantly 
through Dick's brain. 

" Well, speaking for myself," he said 
aloud,' /^ I know I get more joy out of a 
good pair of legs than out of any number 
of uplifting plays of the kind they'd be 



8o LIMBO 

sure to act in your little theatres. The 
people ask for sex and you give them a 
stone." 

How was it, he wondered, that the right 
opinions in the mouths of these people 
sounded so horribly cheap and wrong ? 
They degraded what was noble ; beauty 
became fly-blown at their touch. Their 
intellectual tradition was all wrong. 
Lower classes, it always came back to that. 
When they talked about war and the 
International, Dick felt a hot geyser of 
chauvinism bubbling up in his breast. In 
order to say nothing stupid, he refrained 
from speaking at all. Miss Gibbs switched 
the conversation on to art. She admired 
all the right people. Dick told her that he 
thought Sir Luke Fildes to be the best 
modern artist. But his irritation knew no 
bounds when he found out a little later 
that Mr. Something had read the poems 
of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. He felt 
inclined to say, " You may have read them, 
but of course you can't understand or 
appreciate them." 

Lower Classes . . . 

How clear and splendid were the 
ideas of right and justice ! If only one 



RICHARD GREENOW 8i 

could filter away the contaminating human 
element. . . . Reason compelled him to 
believe in democracy, in international- 
ism, in revolution ; morality demanded 
justice for the oppressed. But neither 
morality nor reason would ever bring him 
to take pleasure in the com^pany of demo- 
crats or revolutionaries, or make him find 
the oppressed, individually, any less 
antipathetic. 

At the end of this nauseating meal, 
Dick was called on to make a speech. 
Rising to his feet, he began stammering 
and hesitating ; he felt like an imbecile. 
Then suddenly inspiration came. The 
great religious ideas of Justice and Demo- 
cracy swept like a rushing wind through 
his mind, purging it of all insignificant 
human and personal preferences or dis- 
likes. He was filled with pentecostal 
fire. He spoke in a white heat of in- 
tellectual passion, dominating his hearers, 
infecting them with his own high enthusi- 
asm. He sat down amid cheers. Miss 
Gibbs and Mr. Thingummy leaned towards 
him vnth flushed, shining faces. 

" That was wonderful, Mr. Greenow. 
I've never heard anything like it," 
6 



82 LIMBO 

exclaimed Miss Gibbs, with genuine, 
unflattering enthusiasm. 

Mr. Thing said something poetical 
about a trumpet-call. Dick looked from 
one to the other with blank and fishy 
eyes. So it was for these creatures he 
had been speaking ! 

Good God ! , . . 



X 

DICK'S life was now a monotonous 
nightmare. The same impos- 
sible situation was repeated again and 
again. If it were not for the fact that 
he knew Pearl Bellairs to be entirely de- 
void of humour, Dick might have sus- 
pected that she was having a little quiet 
fun with him, so grotesque were the 
anomalies of his double life. Grotesque, 
but dreary, intolerably dreary. Situations 
which seem, in contemplation, romantic 
and adventurous have a habit of proving, 
when actually experienced, as dull and 
daily as a bank clerk's routine. When 
you read about it, a Jekyll and Hyde 
existence sounds delightfully amusing ; 
but when you live through it, as Dick 



RICHARD GREENOW 83 

found to his cost, it is merely a boring 
horror. 

In due course Dick was called up by 
the Military Authorities. He pleaded 
conscientious objection. The date of 
his appearance before the Tribunal was 
fixed. Dick did not much relish the 
prospect of being a Christian martyr ; it 
seemed an anachronism. However, it 
would have to be done. He would be 
an absolutist ; there would be a little 
buffeting, spitting, and scourging, fol- 
lowed by an indefinite term of hard 
labour. It was all very unpleasant. But 
nothing could be much more unpleasant 
than life as he was now living it. He 
didn't even mind very much if they killed 
him. Being or not being— the alternatives 
left him equally cold. 

The days that preceded his appearance 
before the Tribunal were busy days, spent 
in consulting solicitors, preparing speeches, 
collecting witnesses. 

" We'll give you a good run for your 
money," said Hyman. " 1 hope they'll 
be feeling a little uncomfortable by the 
time they have done with you, Greenow." 

^^ Not nearly so uncomfortable as I 



84 LIMBO 

shall be feeling/' Dick replied, with a 
slightly melancholy smile. 

The South Marylebone Tribunal sat 
in a gloomy and fetid chamber in a 
police station. Dick, who was extremely 
sensitive to his surroundings, felt his 
fatigue and nervousness perceptibly 
increase as he entered the room. Five 
or six pitiable creatures with paralytic 
mothers or one-man businesses w^ere 
briskly disposed of, and then it was 
Dick's turn to present himself before his 
judges. He looked round the court, 
nodded to Hyman, smiled at Millicent, 
who had so far thawed their wartime 
coolness as to come and see him con- 
demned, caught other friendly eyes. It 
was as though he were about to be 
electrocuted. The preliminaries passed 
off ; he found himself answering questions 
in a loud, clear voice. Then the Military 
Representative began to loom horribly 
large. The Military Representative was a 
solicitor's clerk disguised as a lieutenant 
in the Army Service Corps. He spoke 
in an accent that was more than genteel ; 
it was rich, noble, aristocratic. Dick 
tried to remember where he had heard a 



RICHARD GREENOW 85 

man speaking like that before. He had 
it now. Once when he had been at 
Oxford after term was over. He had 
gone to see the Varieties, which come 
twice nightly and wath cheap seats to 
the theatre after the undergraduates 
have departed. One of the turns had 
been a Nut, a descendant of the bloods 
and Champagne Charlies of earlier days. 
A young man in an alpaca evening suit 
and a monocle. He had danced, sung a 
song, spoken some patter. Sitting in 
the front row^ of the stalls, Dick had been 
able to see the large, swollen, tuber- 
culous glands in his neck. They wobbled 
when he danced or sang. Fascinatingly 
horrible, those glands ; and the young 
man, how terribly, painfully pathetic. 
. . . When the Military Representative 
spoke, he could hear again that wretched 
Nut's rendering of the Eton and Oxford 
voice. It unnerved him. 

" What is your religion, Mr. Gree- 
now ? " the Military Representative 
asked. 

Fascinated, Dick looked to see whether 
he too had tuberculous glands. The 
Lieutenant had to repeat his question 



86 LIMBO 

sharply. When he was irritated, his voice 
went back to its more natural nasal twang. 
Dick recovered his presence of mind. 

" I have no religion/' he answered. 

" But, surely, sir, you must have some 
kind of religion." 

'' Well, if I must, if it's in the Army 
Regulations, you had better put me down 
as an Albigensian, or a Bogomile, or, 
better still, as a Manichean. One can't 
find oneself in this court without possess- 
ing a profound sense of the reality and 
active existence of a power of evil equal 
to, if not greater than, the power of 
good." 

" This is rather irrelevant, Mr. 
Greenow," said the Chairman. 

" I apologize." Dick bowed to the 
court. 

'' But if," the Military Representative 
continued — " if your objection is not 
religious,, may I ask what it is ? " 

" It is based on a belief that all war 
is wrong, and that the solidarity of the 
human race can only be achieved in 
practice by protesting against war, 
wherever it appears and in whatever 
form." 



RICHARD GREENOW 87 

" Do you disbelieve in force, Mr. 
Greenow ? " 

'^ You might as well ask me if I dis- 
believe in gravitation. Of course, I 
believe in force : it is a fact.'' 

'^ \Vh?t would you do if you saw a 
German violating your sister ? " said 
the Military Representative, putting his 
deadliest question. 

^' Perhaps I had better ask my sister 
first," Dick replied. " She is sitting just 
behind you in the court." 

The Military Representative was 
covered with confusion. He coughed 
and blew his nose. The case dragged on. 
Dick made a speech ; the Military Re- 
presentative made a speech ; the Chair- 
man made a speech. The atmosphere 
of the court-room grew fouler and fouler. 
Dick sickened and suffocated in the 
second-hand air. An immense lassitude 
took possession of him ; he did not care 
about am^hing — about the cause, about 
himself, about Hyman or Millicent or 
Pearl Bellairs. He was just tired. 
Voices buzzed and drawled in his ears 
— sometimes his owm voice, som^etimes 
other people's. He did not listen to 



88 LIMBO 

what they said. He was tired — tired of 
all this idiotic talk, tired of the heat 
and smell. . . . 

Tired of picking up very thistly wheat 
sheaves and propping them up in stooks on 
the yellow stubble. For that was what, 
suddenly, he found himself doing. Over- 
head the sky expanded in endless steppes 
of blue-hot cobalt. The pungent prickly 
dust of the dried sheaves plucked at 
his nose with imminent sneezes, made his 
eyes smart and water. In the distance a 
reaping-machine whirred and hummed. 
Dick looked blankly about him, wondering 
where he was. He was thankful, at any 
rate, not to be in that sweltering court- 
room ; and it was a mercy, too, to have 
escaped from the odious gentility of the 
Military Representative's accent. And, 
after all, there were worse occupations 
than harvesting. 

Gradually, and bit by bit, Dick pieced 
together his history. He had, it seemed, 
done a cowardly and treacherous thing : 
deserted in the face of the enemy, be- 
trayed his cause. He had a bitter letter 



RICHARD GREENOW 89 

from Hyman. " WTiy couldn't you have 
stuck it out r I thought it was in you. 
You've urged others to go to prison 
for their beliefs, but you get out of it 
yourself by sneaking off to a soft alter- 
native ser\ace job on a friend's estate. 
You've brought discredit on the whole 
movement." It was very painful, but 
what could he answer ? The truth was so 
ridiculous that nobody could be expected 
to swallow it. And yet the fact was that 
he had been as much startled to find 
himself working at Crome as anyone. It 
was all Pearl's doing. 

He had found in his room a piece of 
paper covered with the large, flamboyant 
feminine writing which he knew to be 
Pearl's. It was evidently the rough copy 
of an article on the delights of being a 
land-girl : dewy dawns, rosy children's 
faces, quaint cottages, mossy thatch, 
mulkmaids, healthy exercise. Pearl was 
being a land-girl ; but he could hardly 
explain the fact to Hyman. Better not 
attempt to answer him. 

Dick hated the manual labour of the 
farm. It was hard, monotonous, dirty, 
and depressing. It inhibited almost com- 



90 LIMBO 

pletely the functions of his brain. He was 
unable to think about anything at all ; 
there was no opportunity to do anything 
but feel uncomfortable. God had not 
made him a Caliban to scatter ordure over 
fields, to pick up ordure from cattle-yards. 
His role was Prospero. 

" Ban, Ban, Caliban " — it was to that 
derisive measure that he pumped water, 
sawed wood, mowed grass ; it was a march . 
for his slow, clotted feet as he followed the 
dung-carts up the winding lanes. '' Ban, 
Ban, Caliban — Ban, Ban, Ban . . .'' 

" Oh, that bloody old fool Tolstoy," 
was his prof oundest reflection on a general 
subject in three months of manual labour 
and communion with mother earth. 

He hated the work, and his fellow- 
workers hated him. They mistrusted him 
because they could not understand him, 
taking the silence of his overpowering shy- 
ness for arrogance and the contempt of one 
class for another. Dick longed to become 
friendly with them. His chief trouble 
was that he did not know what to say. 
At meal-times he would spend long 
minutes in cudgelling his brains for some 
suitable remark to make. And even if 



RICHARD GREENOW 91 

he thought of something good, hke — " It 
looks as though it were going to be a good 
year for roots," he somehow hesitated to 
speak, feeUng that such a remark, uttered 
in his exquisitely modulated tones, would 
be, somehow, a little ridiculous. It was 
the sort of thing that ought to be said 
rustically, with plenty of Z's and long 
vowels, in the manner of William Barnes. 
In the end, for lack of courage to act the 
yokel's part, he generally remained silent. 
While the others were eating their bread 
and cheese with laughter and talk, he sat 
like the skeleton at the feast — a skeleton 
that longed to join in the revelry, but had 
not the power to move its stony jaws. 
On the rare occasions that he actually 
succeeded in uttering something, the 
labourers looked at one another in surprise 
and alarm, as though it were indeed a 
skeleton that had spoken. 

He was not much more popular with 
the other inhabitants of the village. 
Often, in the evenings, as he was return- 
ing from work, the children would pursue 
him, yelling. With the unerringly cruel 
instinct of the young they had recognized 
in him a fit object for abuse and lapidation. 



92 LIMBO 

An outcast member of another class, from 
whom that class in casting him out had 
withdrawn its protection, an alien in 
speech and habit, a criminal, as their 
zealous schoolmaster lost no opportunity 
of reminding them, guilty of the blackest 
treason against God and man — ^he was the 
obviously predestined victim of childish 
persecution. When stones began to fly, 
and dung and precocious obscenity, he 
bowed his head and pretended not to 
notice that anything unusual was hap- 
pening. It was difficult, however, to 
look quite dignified. 

There were occasional short alleviations 
to the dreariness of his existence. One 
day, when he was engaged in his usual 
occupation of manuring, a fam.iliar figure 
suddenly appeared along the footpath 
through the field. It was Mrs. Cravister. 
She was evidently staying at the big house ; 
one of the Manorial dachshunds preceded 
her. He took off his cap. 

" Mr. Greenow ! " she exclaimed, 
coming to a halt. " Ah, what a pleasure 
to see you again ! Working on the land : 
so Tolstoyan. But I trust it doesn't 
affect your aesthetic ideas in the same way 



RICHARD GREENOW 93 

as It did his. Fifty peasants singing to- 
gether is music ; but Bach's chromatic 
fantasia is mere gibbering incompre- 
hensibiUty." 

" I don't do this for pleasure," Dick 
explained. " It's hard labour, meted out 
to the Conscientious Objector." 

" Of course, of course," said Mrs. 
Cravister, raising her hand to arrest any 
further explanation. " I had forgotten. 
A conscientious objector, a Bible student. 
I remember how passionately devoted you 
were, even at school, to the Bible." 

She closed her eyes and nodded her 
head several times. 

" On the contrary " Dick began ; 

but it was no good. Mrs. Cravister 
had determined that he should be a 
Bible student and it was no use gainsay- 
ing her. She cut him short. 

" Dear me, the Bible. . . . What a 
style ! That alone would prove it to 
have been directly inspired. You re- 
member how Mahomet appealed to the 
beauty of his style as a sign of his divine 
mission. Why has nobody done the 
same for the Bible ? It remains for 
you, Mr. Greenow, to do so. You will 



94 LIMBO 

write a book about it. How I envy 
you ! " 

" The style is very fine," Dick ventured, 
" but don't you think the matter occa- 
sionally leaves something to be desired ? " 

" The matter is nothing," cried Mrs. 
Cravister, making a gesture that seemed 
to send all meaning flying like a pinch of 
salt along the wind — " nothing at all. 
It's the style that counts. Think of 
Madame Bovary." 

" I certainly will," said Dick. 

Mrs. Cravister held out her hand. 
" Good-bye. Yes, I certainly envy you. 
I envy you your innocent labour and 
your incessant study of that most 
wonderful of books. If I were asked, 
Mr. Greenow, what book I should take 
with me to a desert island, what single 
solitary book, I should certainly say the 
Bible, though, indeed, there are moments 
when I think I should choose Tristram 
Shandy. Good-bye." 

Mrs. Cravister sailed slowly away. 
The little brown basset trotted ahead, 
straining his leash. One had the im- 
pression of a great ship being towed 
into harbour by a diminutive tug. 



RICHARD GREENOW 95 

Dick was cheered hy this glimpse of 
civilization and humanity. The un- 
expected arrival, one Saturday afternoon, 
of Millicent was not quite such an un- 
mixed pleasure. " I've come to see how 
you're getting on," she announced, " and 
to put your cottage straight and make 
you comfortable." 

" Very kind of you," said Dick. He 
didn't want his cottage put straight. 

Millicent was in the Ministry of 
Munitions now, controlling three thousand 
female clerks with unsurpassed effici- 
ency. Dick looked at her curiously, as 
she talked that evening of her doings. 
" To think I should have a sister like 
that," he said to himself. She was 
terrifying. 

" You do enjoy bullying other people ! " 
he exclaimed at last. " You've found 
your true vocation. One sees now how 
the new world will be arranged after 
the war. The women will continue to 
do all the bureaucratic jobs, all that 
entails routine and neatness and inter- 
fering with other people's affairs. And 
man, it is to be hoped, will be left free 
for the important statesman's business. 



96 LIMBO 

free for creation and thought. He will 
stay at home and give proper education 
to the children, too. He is fit to do 
these things, because his mind is dis- 
interested and detached. It's an ar- 
rangement which will liberate all man's 
best energies for their proper uses. The 
only flaw I can see in the system is that 
you women will be so fiendishly and 
ruthlessly tyrannical in your admini- 
stration." 

" You can't seriously expect me to 
argue with you," said Millicent. 

" No, please don't. I am not strong 
enough. My dung-carrying has taken 
the edge off all my reasoning powers." 

Millicent spent the next morning in 
completely rearranging Dick's furniture. 
By lunch-time every article in the cottage 
was occupying a new position. 

" That's much nicer," said Millicent, 
surveying her work and seeing that it was 
good. 

There was a knock at the door. Dick 
opened it and was astonished to find 
Hyman. 

" I just ran down to see how you were 
getting on," he explained. 



RICHARD GREENOW 97 

" I'm getting on very well since my 
sister rearranged my furniture," said 
Dick. He found it pleasing to have an 
opportunity of exercising his long un- 
used powers of malicious irony. This 
was very mild, but with practice he 
would soon come on to something more 
spiteful and amusing. 

Hyman shook hands with Millicent, 
scowling as he did so. He was irritated 
that she was there ; he wanted to talk 
with Dick alone. He turned his back on 
her and began addressing Dick. 

" Well," he said, " I haven't seen you 
since the fatal day. How is the turnip- 
hoeing ? " 

'' Pretty beastly," said Dick. 

" Better than doing hard labour in a 
gaol, I suppose ? " 

Dick nodded his head wearily, fore- 
seeing what must inevitably come. 

" You've escaped that all right," 
Hyman went on. 

^' Yes ; you ought to be thankful," 
Millicent chimed in. 

" I still can't understand why you 
did it, Greenow. It was a blow to me. 
I didn't expect it of you." Hyman 
7 



98 LIMBO 

spoke with feeling. '' It was desertion ; 



it was treason." 



" I agree/' said Millicent judicially. 
" He ought to have stuck to his 
principles." 

" He ought to have stuck to what 
was right, oughtn't he, Miss Greenow ? " 
Hyman turned towards Millicent, pleased 
at finding someone who shared his views. 

" Of course," she replied — " of course. 
I totally disagree with you about what 
is right. But if he believed it right not 
to fight, he certainly ought to have gone 
to prison for his belief." 

Dick lit a pipe with an air of non- 
chalance. He tried to disguise the fact 
that he was feeling extremely uncom- 
fortable under these two pairs of merci- 
less, accusing eyes. 

" To my mind, at any rate," said 
Millicent, " your position seems quite 
illogical and untenable, Dick." 

It was a relief to be talked to and not 
about. 

" I'm sorry about that," said Dick 
rather huskily — not a very intelligent 
remark, but what was there to say ? 

" Of course, it's illogical and untenable. 



RICHARD GREENOW 99 

Your sister is quite right." Hyman 
banged the table. 

" I can't understand what induced 
you to take it up " 

" After you'd said you were going to 
be one of the absolutes," cried Hyman, 
interrupting and continuing Millicent's 
words. 

" Why ? " said Millicent. 

" Why, why, why ? " Hyman echoed. 

Dick, who had been blowing out 
smoke at a great rate, put down his pipe. 
The taste of the tobacco was making 
him feel rather sick. " I wish you would 
stop," he said wearily. " If I gave you 
the real reasons, you wouldn't believe 
me. And I can't invent any others that 
would be in the least convincing." 

" I believe the real reason is that you 
were afraid of prison." 

Dick leaned back in his chair and shut 
his eyes. He did not mind being in- 
sulted now ; it made no difference. 
Hyman and Millicent were still talking 
about him, but what they said did not 
interest him ; he scarcely listened. 

They went back to London together in 
the evening. 



loo LIMBO 

" Very intelligent woman, your sister/' 
said Hyman just before they were starting. 
" Pity she's not on the right side about 
the war and so forth." 

Four weeks later Dick received a letter 
in which Hyman announced that he and 
Millicent had decided to get married. 

" I am happy to think," Dick wrote in 
his congratulatory reply, " that it was I 
who brought you together." 

He smiled as he read through the sen- 
tence ; that was what the Christian 
martyr might say to the two lions who 
had scraped acquaintance over his bones 
in the am.phitheatre. 

One warm afternoon in the summer 
of 191 8, Mr. Hobart, Clerk to the Wibley 
Town Council, was disturbed in the midst 
of his duties by the sudden entry into his 
office of a small dark man, dressed in 
corduroys and gaiters, but not having the 
air of a genuine agricultural labourer. 

" What may I do for you ? " inquired 
Mr. Hobart. 

" I have come to inquire about my 
vote," said the stranger. 

'' Aren't you already registered f " 



1 1 



RICHARD GREENOW loi 

" Not yet. You see, it isn't long since 
the Act was passed giving us the vote." 

Mr, Hobart stared. 

" I don't quite follow," he said. 

" I may not look it," said the stranger, 
putting his head on one side and looking 
arch — " I may not look it, but I will con- 
fess to you, Mr. — er~Mr. — er " 

" Hobart." 

" Mr. Hobart, that I am a woman of 
over thirty." 

Mr. Hobart grew visibly paler. Then, 
assuming a forced smile and speaking as 
one speaks to a child or a spoiled animal, 
he said : 

" I see — I see. Over thirty, dear 
me. 

He looked at the bell, which was over by 
the fireplace at the other side of the room, 
and wondered how he should ring it 
without rousing the maniac's suspicions. 

" Over thirty," the stranger went on. 
'^ You know my womian's secret. I am 
Miss Pearl Bellairs, the novelist. Perhaps 
you have read some of my books. Or are 
you too busy ? " 

" Oh no, I've read several," Mr. 
Hobart replied, smiling more and more 



I02 LIMBO 

brightly and speaking in even more 
coaxing and indulgent tones. 

" Then we're friends already, Mr. 
Hobart. Anyone who knows my books, 
knows me. My whole heart is in them. 
Now, you must tell me all about my poor 
little vote. I shall be very patriotic with 
it when the time comes to use it." 

Mr. Hobart saw his opportunity. 

" Certainly, Miss Bellairs," he said. 
" I will ring for my clerk and we'll — er 
— we'll take down the details." 

He got up, crossed the room, and rang 
the bell with violence. 

" I'll just go and see that he brings the 
right books," he added, and darted to the 
door. Once outside in the passage, he 
mopped his face and heaved a sigh of 
relief. That had been a narrow shave, by 
Jove. A loony in the office — dangerous- 
looking brute, too. 

On the following day Dick woke up 
and found himself in a bare whitewashed 
room, sparsely furnished with a little iron 
bed, a washstand, a chair, and table. He 
looked round him in surprise. Where 
had he got to this time ? He went to the 



I 
I 



RICHARD GREENOW 103 

door and tried to open it ; it was locked. 
An idea entered his mind : he was 
in barracks somewhere ; the MiHtary 
Authorities must have got hold of him 
somehow in spite of his exemption cer- 
tificate. Or perhaps Pearl had gone and 
enlisted. . . . He turned next to the 
window, which was barred. Outside, he 
could see a courtyard, filled, not with 
soldiers, as he had expected, but a curious 
motley crew of individuals, some men and 
some women, wandering hither and thither 
with an air of complete aimlessness. 
Very odd, he thought — very odd. Beyond 
the courtyard, on the farther side of a 
phenomenally high wall, ran a railway line 
and beyond it a village, roofed with tile 
and thatch, and a tall church spire in the 
midst. Dick looked carefully at the spire. 
Didn't he know it I Surely — yes, those 
imbricated copper plates with which it 
was covered, that gilded ship that served 
as wind vane, the little gargoyles at the 
corner of the tower — there could be no 
doubt ; it was Belbury church. Bel- 
bury — that was where the , . . No, no ; 
he wouldn't believe it. But looking down 
again into that high-walled courtyard, 



I04 LIMBO 

full of those queer, aimless folk, he was 
forced to admit it. The County Asylum 
stands at Belbury. He had often noticed 
it from the train, a huge, gaunt building 
of sausage-coloured brick, standing close 
to the railway, on the opposite side of the 
line to Belbury village and church. He 
remembered how, the last time he had 
passed in the train, he had wondered what 
they did in the asylum. He had regarded 
it then as one of those mysterious, un- 
approachable places, like Lhassa or a 
Ladies' Lavatory, into which he would 
never penetrate. And now, here he was, 
looking out through the bars, like any other 
madman. It was all Pearl's doing, as 
usual. If there had been no bars, he 
would have thrown himself out of the 
window. 

He sat down on his bed and began to 
think about what he should do. He 
would have to be very sane and show 
them by his behaviour and speech that 
he was no more mad than the commonalty 
of mankind. He would be extremely 
dignified about it all. If a warder or 
a doctor or somebody came in to see 
him, he would rise to his feet and say in 



RICHARD GREENOW 105 

the calmest and severest tones : " May I 
ask, pray, why I am detained here and 
upon whose authority ? " That ought 
to stagger them. He practised that 
sentence, and the noble attitude with 
which he would accompany it, for the 
best part of an hour. Then, suddenly, 
there was the sound of a key in the lock. 
He hastily sat down again on the bed. 
A brisk little man of about forty, clean 
shaven and with pince-nez, stepped into 
the room, followed by a nurse and 
a warder in uniform. The doctor ! 
Dick's heart was beating with absurd 
violence ; he felt like an amateur actor 
at the first performance of an imper- 
fectly rehearsed play. He rose, rather 
unsteadily, to his feet, and in a voice that 
quavered a little with an emotion he 
could not suppress, began : 

'' Pray I ask, may . . ." 

Then, realizing that something had 
gone wrong, he hesitated, stammered, 
and came to a pause. 

The doctor turned to the nurse. 

" Did you hear that ? " he asked. " He 
called me May. He seems to think 
everybody's a woman, not only himself." 



io6 LIMBO 

Turning to Dick with a cheerful smile, 
he went on : 

" Sit down, Miss Bellairs, please sit 
down." 

It was too much. Dick burst into 
tears, flung himself upon the bed, and 
buried his face in the pillow. The doctor 
looked at him as he lay there sobbing, his 
whole body shaken and convulsed. 

" A bad case, I fear." 

And the nurse nodded. 

For the next three days Dick refused 
to eat. It was certainly unreasonable, 
but it seemed the only way of making a 
protest. On the fourth day the doctor 
signed a certificate to the effect that 
forcible feeding had become necessary. 
Accompanied by two warders and a 
nurse, he entered Dick's room. 

" Now, Miss Bellairs," he said, making 
a last persuasive appeal, " do have a little 
of this nice soup. We have come to 
have lunch with you." 

" I refuse to eat," said Dick icily, " as 
a protest against my unlawful detention 
in this place. I am as sane as any of 
you here." 



RICHARD GREENOW 107 

" Yes, yes." The doctor's voice was 
soothing. He made a sign to the warders. 
One was very large and stout, the other 
wiry, thin, sinister, Hke the second 
murderer in a play. They closed in on 
Dick. 

"' I won't eat and I won't be made to 
eat ! " Dick cried. " Let me go ! " he 
shouted at the fat warder, who had laid 
a hand on his shoulder. His temper 
was beginning to rise. 

" Now, do behave yourself," said the 
fat warder. " It ain't a bit of use kick- 
ing up a row. Now, do take a little of 
this lovely soup," he added wheedlingly. 

" Let me go ! " Dick screamed again, 
all his self-control gone. " I will not let 
myself be bullied." 

He began to struggle violently. The 
fat warder put an arm round his 
shoulders, as though he were an immense 
mother comforting an irritable child. 
Dick felt himself helpless ; the struggle 
had quite exhausted him ; he was weaker 
than he had any idea of. He began 
kicking the fat man's shins ; it was the 
only way he could still show fight. 

" Temper, temper," remonstrated the 



io8 LIMBO 

warder, more motherly than ever. The 
thin warder stooped down, slipped a 
strap round the kicking legs, and drew it 
tight. Dick could move no more. His 
fury found vent in words — vain, abusive, 
filthy words, such as he had not used 
since he was a schoolboy. 

" Let me go," he screamed — -" let me 
go, you devils ! You beasts, you swine ! 
beasts and swine ! " he howled again and 
again. 

They soon had himi securely strapped 
in a chair, his head held back ready for 
the doctor and his horrible-looking tubes. 
They were pushing the horrors up his 
nostrils. He coughed and choked, spat, 
shouted inarticulately, retched. It was 
like having a spoon put on your tongue 
and being told to say A-a-h, but worse ; 
it was like jumping into the river and 
getting water up your nose — how he had 
always hated that ! — only much worse. 
It was like almost everything unpleasant, 
only much, much worse than all. He 
exhausted himself struggling against his 
utterly immovable bonds. They had 
to carry him to his bed, he was so 
weak. 



RICHARD GREENOW 109 

He lay there, unmoving — for he was 
unable to move — staring at the ceiling. 
He felt as though he were floating on 
air, unsupported, solid no longer ; the 
sensation was not unpleasant. For that 
reason he refused to let his mind dwell 
upon it ; he would think of nothing that 
was not painful, odious, horrible. He 
thought about the torture which had 
just been inflicted on him and of the 
monstrous injustice of w^hich he was a 
victim. He thought of the millions 
who had been and were still being 
slaughtered in the war ; he thought of 
their pain, all the countless separate 
pains of them ; pain incommunicable, 
individual, beyond the reach of sym- 
pathy ; infinities of pain pent within 
frail finite bodies ; pain without sense or 
object, bringing with it no hope and no 
redemption, futile, unnecessary, stupid. 
In one supreme apocalyptic moment he 
saw, he felt the universe in all its 
horror. 

They forcibly fed him again the fol- 
lowing morning and again on the day 
after. On the fourth day pneumonia, 
the result of shock, complicated by 



no LIMBO 

acute inflammation of the throat and 
pleura, set in. The fever and pain 
gained ground. Dick had not the 
strength to resist their ravages , and his 
condition grew hourly worse. His mind, 
however, continued to work clearly — too 
clearly. It occurred to him that he 
might very likely die. He asked for 
pencil and paper to be brought him, and 
putting forth all the little strength he 
had left, he began to make his testa- 
ment. 

" I am perfectly sane," he wrote at 
the top of the page, and underlined the 
words three times. " I am confined here 
by the most intol. injust." As soon as 
he began, he realized how little time 
and strength were left him ; it was a 
waste to finish the long words. " They 
are killing me for my opins. I regard 
this war and all wars as utter bad. 
Capitalists' war. The devils will be 
smashed sooner later. Wish I could 
help. But it won't make any difference," 
he added on a new line and as though 
by an afterthought. " World will always 
be hell. Cap. or Lab., Engl, or Germ. — 
all beasts. One in a mill, is Good. 



RICHARD GREENOW iii 

I wasn't. Selfish intellect. Perhaps 
Pearl Bellairs better. If die, send corp. 
to hosp. for anatomy. Useful for once 
in my life ! " 

Quite suddenly, he lapsed into delirium. 
The clear lucidity of his mind became 
troubled. The real world disappeared 
from before his eyes, and in its place he 
saw a succession of bright, unsteady 
visions created by his sick fantasy. Scenes 
from his childhood, long forgotten, 
bubbled up and disappeared. Unknown, 
hideous faces crowded in upon him ; old 
friends revisited him. He was living in 
a bewildering mixture of the familiar and 
the strange. And all the while, across 
this changing unsubstantial world, there 
hurried a continual, interminable pro- 
cession of dromedaries — countless high- 
domed beasts, with gargoyle faces and 
stiff legs and necks that bobbed as though 
on springs. Do what he could, he was 
unable to drive them away. He lost his 
temper with the brutes at last, struck at 
them, shouted ; but in vain. The room 
rang with his cries of, " Get away, you 
beasts. Bloody humps. None of your 
nonconformist faces here." And w^hile 



112 LIMBO 

he was yelling and gesticulating (with his 
left hand only), his right hand was still 
busily engaged in writing. The words 
were clear and legible ; the sentences 
consecutive and eminently sane. Dick 
might rave, but Pearl Bellairs remained 
calm and in full possession of her deplorable 
faculties. And what was Pearl doing 
with her busy pencil, while Dick, like 
a frenzied Betsy Trotwood, shouted at 
the trespassing camels ? The first thing 
she did was to scratch out all that poor 
Dick had said about the war. Underneath 
it she wrote : 

" We shall not sheathe the sword, 
which we have not lightly . . ." And 
then, evidently finding that memorable 
sentence too long, particularly so since the 
addition of Poland and Czecho-Slovakia 
to the list of Allies, she began again. 

" We are fighting for honour and the 
defence of Small Nationalities. Plucky 
little Belgium ! We went into the war 
with clean hands." 

A little of Pearl's thought seemed at 
this moment to have slopped over into 
Dick's mind ; for he suddenly stopped 
abusing his dromedaries and began to cry 



RICHARD GREENOW 113 

out in the most pitiable fashion, " Clean 
hands, clean hands ! I can't get mine 
clean. I can't, I can't, I can't. I 
contaminate everything." And he kept 
rubbing his left hand against the bed- 
clothes and putting his fingers to his nose, 
only to exclaim, " Ugh, they still stink of 
goat ! " and then to start rubbing again. 

The right hand wrote on unperturbed. 
" No peace with the Hun until he is 
crushed and humiliated. Self-respecting 
Britons will refuse to shake a Hunnish 
hand for many a long year after the war. 
No more German waiters. Intern the 
Forty-Seven Thousand Hidden Hands in 
High Places ! " 

At this point, Pearl seemed to have 
been struck by a new idea. She took a 
clean page and began : 

" To the Girls of England. I am a 
woman and proud of the fact. But, girls, 
I blushed for my sex to-day when I read in 
the papers that there had been cases of 
English girls talking to Hun prisoners, and 
not only talking to them, but allowing 
themselves to be kissed by them. Imagine ! 
Clean, healthy British girls allowing them- 
selves to be kissed by the swinish and 
8 



114 LIMBO 

bloodstained lips of the unspeakable 
Hun ! Do you wonder that I blush for 
my sex ? Stands England where she did ? 
No, emphatically no, if these stories are 
true, and true — sadly and with a heavy 
bleeding heart do I admit it — true they 
are." 

" Clean hands, clean hands," Dick was 
still muttering, and applying his fingers to 
his nose once more, " Christ," he cried, 
" how they stink ! Goats, dung . . ." 

" Is there any excuse for such conduct ? " 
the pencil continued. " The most that 
can be said in palliation of the offence is 
that girls are thoughtless, that they do 
not consider the full significance of their 
actions. But listen to me, girls of all ages, 
classes and creeds, from the blue-eyed, 
light-hearted flapper of sixteen to the 
stern-faced, hard-headed business woman 
— listen to me. There is a girlish charm 
about thoughtlessness, but there is a point 
beyond which thoughtlessness becomes 
criminal. A flapper may kiss a Hun 
without thinking what she is doing, 
merely for the fun of the thing ; perhaps, 
even, out of misguided pity. Will she 
repeat the offence if she realizes, as she 



RICHARD GREENOW 115 

must realize if she will only think, that 
this thoughtless fun, this mawkish and 
hysterical pity, is nothing less than 
Treason ? Treason — it is a sinister word, 
but . . ." 

The pencil stopped writing ; even 
Pearl was beginning to grow tired. Dick's 
shouting had died away to a hoarse, faint 
whisper. Suddenly her attention was 
caught by the last words that Dick had 
written — the injunction to send his body, 
if he died, to a hospital for an anatomy. 
She put forth a great effort. 

" NO. NO," she wrote in huge capitals. 
" Bury me in a little country churchyard, 
with lovely marble angels like the ones in 
St. George's at Windsor, over Princess 
Charlotte's tomb. Not anatomy. Too 
horrible, too disgus ..." 

The coma which had blotted out Dick's 
mind fell now^ upon hers as well. Two 
hours later Dick Greenow was dead ; the 
fingers of his right hand still grasped a 
pencil. The scribbled papers were thrown 
away as being merely the written ravings 
of a madman ; they were accustomed to 
that sort of thing at the asylum. 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 



AT the best of times it is a long way 
from Chicago to Blaybury in 
Wiltshire, but war has fixed between 
them a great gulf. In the circumstances, 
therefore, it seemed an act of singular 
devotion on the part of Peter Jacobsen 
to have come all the way from the 
Middle West, in the fourth year of war, 
on a visit to his old friend Petherton, 
when the project entailed a single- 
handed struggle with two Great Powers 
over the question of passports and the 
risk, when they had been obtained, of 
perishing miserably by the way, a victim 
of fright fulness. 

At the expense of much time and 
more trouble Jacobsen had at last arrived ; 
the gulf between Chicago and Blaybury 
was spanned. In the hall of Petherton's 
house a scene of welcome was being 
enacted under the dim gaze of six or seven 

1x6 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 117 

brown family portraits by unknown 
masters of the eighteenth and nineteenth 
centuries. 

Old Alfred Petherton, a grey shawl 
over his shoulders — for he had to be 
careful, even in June, of draughts and 
colds — was shaking his guest's hand with 
interminable cordiality. 

" My dear boy," he kept repeating, 
" it is a pleasure to see you. My dear 
boy . . ." 

Jacobsen limply abandoned his fore- 
arm and waited in patience. 

" I can never be grateful enough,'' 
Mr. Petherton went on — " never grateful 
enough to you for having taken all this 
endless trouble to come and see an old 
decrepit man — for that's what I am now, 
that's what I am, believe me." 

" Oh, I assure you ..." said Jacobsen, 
with vague deprecation. " Le vieux 
cretin qui pleurniche," he said to him- 
self. French was a wonderfully expres- 
sive language, to be sure. 

" My digestion and my heart have got 
much worse since I saw you last. But I 
think I must have told you about that 
in my letters." 



ii8 LIMBO 

" You did indeed, and I was most 
grieved to hear it." 

'' Grieved '' — what a curious flavour 
that word had ! Like somebody's tea 
which used to recall the most delicious 
blends of forty years ago. But it was 
decidedly the mot juste. It had the right 
obituary note about it. 

" Yes," Mr. Petherton continued, 
" my palpitations are very bad now. 
Aren't they, Marjorie ? " He appealed to 
his daughter who was standing beside him. 

" Father's palpitations are very bad," 
she replied dutifully. 

It was as though they were talking 
about some precious heirloom long and 
lovingly cherished. 

" And my digestion. . . . This physical 
infirmity makes all mental activity so 
difficult. All the same, I manage to do 
a little useful work. We'll discuss that 
later, though. You must be feeling tired 
and dusty after your journey down. I'll 
guide you to your room. Marjorie, will 
you get someone to take up his luggage ? " 

" I can take it myself," said Jacobsen, 
and he picked up a small gladstone-bag 
that had been deposited by the door. 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 119 

" Is that all ? " Mr. Petherton asked. 

" Yes, that's all." 

As one living the life of reason, Jacob- 
sen objected to owning things. One so 
easily became the slave of things and 
not their master. He liked to be free ; 
he checked his possessive instincts and 
limited his possessions to the strictly 
essential. He was as much or as little at 
home at Blaybury or Pekin. He could 
have explained all this if he liked. But 
in the present case it wasn't worth 
taking the trouble. 

" This is your humble chamber," said 
Mr. Petherton, throwing open the door 
of what was, indeed, a very handsome 
spare-room, bright with chintzes and 
cut flowers and silver candlesticks. '' A 
poor thing, but your own." 

Courtly grace ! Dear old man ! Apt 
quotation ! Jacobsen unpacked his bag 
and arranged its contents neatly and 
methodically in the various drawers and 
shelves of the wardrobe. 

It was a good many years now since 
Jacobsen had come in the course of his 
grand educational tour to Oxford. He 



I20 LIMBO 

spent a couple of years there, for he hked 
the place, and its inhabitants were a 
source of unfailing amusement to him. 

A Norwegian, born in the Argentine, 
educated in the United States, in France, 
and in Germany ; a man wdth no 
nationality and no prejudices, enor- 
mously old in experience, he found 
something very new^ and fresh and enter- 
taining about his fellow-students with 
their comic public-school traditions and 
fabulous ignorance of the world. He 
had quietly watched them doing their 
little antics, feeling all the time that a 
row of bars separated them from him- 
self, and that he ought, after each par- 
ticularly amusing trick, to offer them a 
bun or a handful of pea-nuts. In the 
intervals of sight-seeing in this strange 
and delightful Jardin des Plantes he read 
Greats, and it was through Aristotle 
that he had come into contact with 
Alfred Petherton, fellow and tutor of 
his college. 

The name of Petherton is a respect- 
able one in the academic world. You will 
find it on the title-page of such meri- 
torious, if not exactly brilliant, books as 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 121 

Plato^s Predecessors^ Three Scottish Meta- 
physicians^ hitroduction to the Study of 
Ethics. Essays in Neo-Idealism. Some of 
his works are published in cheap editions 
as text-books. 

One of those curious inexpHcable 
friendships that often link the most un- 
likely people had sprung up between 
tutor and pupil, and had lasted un- 
broken for upwards of twenty years. 
Petherton felt a fatherly affection for 
the younger man, together with a 
father's pride, now that Jacobsen was 
a man of world-wide reputation, in 
having, as he supposed, spiritually be- 
gotten him. And now Jacobsen had 
travelled three or four thousand miles 
across a w^orld at war just to see the 
old man. Petherton was profoundly 
touched. 

" Did you see any submarines on the 
way over ? " Marjorie asked, as she and 
Jacobsen were strolling together in the 
garden after breakfast the next day. 

" I didn't notice any ; but then I am 
very unobservant about these things." 

There was a pause. At last, " I sup- 



122 LIMBO 

pose there is a great deal of war-work 
being done in America now ? " said 
Marjorie. 

Jacobsen supposed so ; and there 
floated across his mind a vision of massed 
bands, of orators with megaphones, of 
patriotic sky-signs, of streets made 
perilous hy the organized highway 
robbery of Red Cross collectors. He was 
too lazy to describe it all ; besides, she 
wouldn't see the point of it. 

'' I should like to be able to do some 
war-work," Marjorie explained apolo- 
getically. " But I have to look after 
father, and there's the housekeeping, so 
I really haven't the time." 

Jacobsen thought he detected a for- 
mula for the benefit of strangers. She 
evidently wanted to make things right 
about herself in people's minds. Her 
remark about the housekeeping made 
Jacobsen think of the late Mrs. Petherton, 
her mother ; she had been a good- 
looking, painfully sprightly woman with 
a hankering to shine in University 
society at Oxford. One quickly learned 
that she was related to bishops and 
country families ; a hunter of ecclesi- 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 123 

astical lions and a snob. He felt glad 
she was dead. 

'' Won't it be awful when there's no 
war-work," he said. " People will have 
nothing to do or think about when peace 
comes." 

" I shall be glad. Housekeeping will 
be so much easier." 

" True. There are consolations." 

Marjorie looked at him suspiciously ; 
she didn't like being laughed at. What 
an undistinguished-looking little man he 
was ! Short, stoutish, with waxed brown 
moustaches and a forehead that in- 
cipient baldness had made interminably 
high. He looked like the sort of man 
to whom one says : " Thank you, I'll 
take it in notes with a pound's worth of 
silver." There were pouches under his 
eyes and pouches under his chin, and you 
could never guess from his expression what 
he was thinking about. She was glad 
that she was taller than he and could look 
down on him. 

Mr. Petherton appeared from the house, 
his grey shawl over his shoulders and the 
crackling expanse of the Times between 
his hands. 



124 LIMBO 

" Good morrow," he cried. 

To the Shakespearian heartiness of 
this greeting Marjorie returned her most 
icily modern " Morning." Her father 
always said " Good m.orrow " instead 
of " Good morning," and the fact irri- 
tated her with unfailing regularity every 
day of her life. 

" There's a most interesting account," 
said Mr. Petherton, " by a young pilot 
of an air fight in to-day's paper," and as 
they walked up and down the gravel 
path he read the article, which was a 
column and a half in length, 

Marjorie made no attempt to disguise 
her boredom, and occupied herself by 
reading something on the other side of 
the page, craning her neck round to see. 

" Very interesting," said Jacobsen when 
it was finished. 

Mr. Petherton had turned over and was 
now looking at the Court Circular page. 

" I see," he said, " there's someone 
called Beryl Camberley-Belcher going 
to be married. Do you know if that's 
any relation of the Howard Camberley- 
Belchers, Marjorie ? " 

" I've no idea who the Howard Cam- 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 125 

berley-Belchers are/' Marjorie answered 
rather sharply. 

" Oh, I thought you did. Let me 
see. Howard Camberley-Belcher was at 
college with me. And he had a brother 
called James — or was it William ? — and a 
sister who married one of the Riders, or 
at any rate some relation of the Riders ; 
for I know the Camberley-Belchers and 
the Riders used to fit in somewhere. 
Dear me, Pm afraid my memory for 
names is going." 

Marjorie went indoors to prepare the 
day's domestic campaign with the cook. 
When that was over she retired to 
her sitting-room and unlocked her very 
private desk. She must write to Guy 
this morning. Marjorie had known Guy 
Lambourne for years and years, almost as 
long as she could remember. The Lam- 
bournes were old family friends of the 
Pethertons : indeed they were, distantly, 
connections ; they '^fitted in somewhere," 
as Mr. Petherton would say — somewhere, 
about a couple of generations back. 
Marjorie was two years younger than 
Guy ; they were both only children ; 
circumstances had naturally thrown them 



126 LIMBO 

a great deal together. Then Guy's father 
had died, and not long afterwards his 
mother, and at the age of seventeen^Guy 
had actually come to live with the 
Pethertons, for the old man was his 
guardian. And now they were engaged ; 
had been, more or less, from the first year 
of the war. 

Marjorie took pen, ink, and paper. 
'' Dear Guy," she began — ('' We aren't 
sentimental," she had once remarked, 
with a mixture of contempt and secret 
envy, to a friend who had confided that 
she and her fiance never began with 
anything less than Darling.) — " I am 
longing for another of your letters. . . ." 
She went through the usual litany of 
longing. ^' It was father's birthday 
yesterday ; he is sixty-five. I cannot bear 
to think that some day you and I will be 
as old as that. Aunt Ellen sent him a 
Stilton cheese — a useful war-time present. 
How boring housekeeping is. By dint 
of thinking about cheeses my mind is 
rapidly turning into one — a Gruyere ; 
where there isn't cheese there are just 
holes, full of vacuum ..." 

She didn't really mind housekeeping so 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 127 

much. She took it for granted, and did 
it just because it was there to be done. 
Guy, on the contrary, never took any- 
thing for granted ; she made these 
demonstrations for his benefit. 

" I read Keats's letters, as you suggested, 
and thought them too beautiful . . ." 

At the end of a page of rapture she 
paused and bit her pen. What was there 
to say next ? It seemed absurd one should 
have to write letters about the books one 
had been reading. But there was nothing 
else to write about ; nothing ever hap- 
pened. After all, what had happened in 
her life ? Her mother dying when she 
was sixteen ; then the excitement of Guy 
coming to live with them ; then the war, 
but that hadn't meant much to her ; 
then Guy falling in love, and their getting 
engaged. That was really all. She 
wished she could write about her feelings 
in an accurate, complicated way, like 
people in novels ; but when she came to 
think about it, she didn't seem to have 
any feelings to describe. 

She looked at Guy's last letter from 
France. '' Sometimes," he had written, 
" I am tortured by an intense physical 



128 LIMBO 

desire for you. I can think of nothing but 
your beauty, your young, strong body. I 
hate that ; I have to struggle to repress it. 
Do you forgive me ? " It rather thrilled 
her that he should feel like that about her : 
he had always been so cold, so reserved, so 
much opposed to sentimentality — to the 
kisses and endearments she would, perhaps, 
secretly have liked. But he had seemed so 
right when he said, " We must love like 
rational beings, with our minds, not with 
our hands and lips." All the same . . . 

She dipped her pen in the ink and began 
to write again. " I know the feelings you 
spoke of in your letter. Sometimes I long 
for you in the same way. I dreamt the 
other night I was holding you in my arms, 
and woke up hugging the pillow." She 
looked at what she had written. It was 
too awful, too vulgar ! She would have 
to scratch it out. But no, she would 
leave it in spite of everything, just to see 
what he would think about it. She 
finished the letter quickly, sealed and 
stamped it, and rang for the maid to take 
it to the post. When the servant had gone, 
she shut up her desk with a bang. Bang — 
the letter had gone, irrevocably. 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 129 

She picked up a large book lying on the 
table and began to read. It was the first 
volume of the Decline and Fall. Guy 
had said she must read Gibbon ; she 
wouldn't be educated till she had read 
Gibbon. And so yesterday she had gone 
to her father in his library to get the book. 

" Gibbon," Mr. Petherton had said, 
" certainly, my dear. How delightful it 
is to look at these grand old books again. 
One always finds something new every 
time." 

Marjorie gave him to understand that 
she had never read it. She felt rather 
proud of her ignorance. 

Mr. Petherton handed the first of 
eleven volumes to her. " A great book," 
he murmured — " an essential book. It 
fills the gap between your classical history 
and your mediaeval stuff." 

'^ Your " classical history, Marjorie 
repeated to herself, " your " classical 
history indeed ! Her father had an 
irritating way of taking it for granted that 
she knew everything, that classical history 
was as much hers as his. Only a day or 
two before he had turned to her^at 
luncheon with, " Do you remember,£dear 
9 



130 LIMBO 

child, whether it was Pomponazzi who 
denied the personal immortality of the 
soul, or else that queer fellow, Laurentius 
Valla ? It's gone out of my head for the 
moment." Marjorie had quite lost her 
temper at the question — much to the 
innocent bewilderment of her poor father. 

She had set to work with energy on 
the Gibbon ; her bookmarker registered 
the fact that she had got through one 
hundred and twenty-three pages yesterday. 
Marjorie started reading. After two 
pages she stopped. She looked at the 
number of pages still rem.aining to be 
read — and this was only the first volume. 
She felt like a wasp sitting down to eat 
a vegetable marrow. Gibbon's bulk was 
not perceptibly diminished by her first 
bite. It was too long. She shut the book 
and went out for a walk. Passing the 
Whites' house, she saw her friend, 
Beatrice White that was, sitting on the 
lawn with her two babies. Beatrice hailed 
her, and she turned in. 

" Pat a cake, pat a cake," she said. At 
the age of ten months, baby John had 
already learnt the art of patting cakes. 
He slapped the outstretched hand offered 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 131 

him, and his face, round and smooth and 
pink like an enormous peach, beamed with 
pleasure. 

" Isn't he a darling ! " Marjorie 
exclaimed. ^' You know, I'm sure he's 
grown since last I saw him, which was on 
Tuesday." 

" He put on eleven ounces last week," 
Beatrice affirmed. 

" How wonderful ! His hair's coming 
on splendidly . . ." 

It was Sunday the next day. Jacobsen 
appeared at breakfast in the neatest of 
black suits. He looked, Marjorie thought, 
more than ever like a cashier. She longed 
to tell him to hurry up or he'd miss the 
8.53 for the second time this week and 
the manager would be annoyed. Marjorie 
herself was, rather consciously, not in 
Sunday best. 

'' What is the name of the Vicar ? " 
Jacobsen inquired, as he helped himself 
to bacon. 

" Trubshaw. Luke Trubshaw, I 
believe." 

" Does he preach well ? " 

" He didn't when I used to hear him. 



132 LIMBO 

But I don't often go to church now, so 
I don't know what he's like these 
days." 

" Why don't you go to church ? " 
Jacobsen inquired, with a silkiness of tone 
which veiled the crude outlines of his 
leading question. 

Marjorie was painfully conscious of 
blushing. She was filled with rage 
against Jacobsen. " Because," she said 
firmly, " I don't think it necessary to 
give expression to my religious feelings 
by making a lot of" — she hesitated 
a moment — '' a lot of meaningless gestures 
with a crowd of other people." 

" You used to go," said Jacobsen. 

" When I was a child and hadn't 
thought about these things." 

Jacobsen was silent, and concealed a 
smile in his coffee-cup. Really, he said 
to himself, there ought to be religious 
conscription for women — and for most 
men, too. It was grotesque the way 
these people thought they could stand by 
themselves — the fools, when there was 
the infinite authority of organized religion 
to support their ridiculous feebleness. 

'' Does Lambourne go to church ? " 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 133 

he asked maliciously, and with an air of 
perfect naivete and good faith. 

Marjorie coloured again, and 'a fresh 
wave of hatred surged up within her. 
Even as she had said the words she had 
w^ondered w^hether Jacobsen would notice 
that the phrase " meaningless gestures " 
didn't ring very much like one of her 
ow^n coinages. " Gesture " — that was 
one of Guy's words, like " incredible," 
"exacerbate," "impinge," "sinister." Of 
course all her present views about religion 
had come from Guy. She looked Jacobsen 
straight in the face and replied : 

" Yes, I think he goes to church 
pretty regularly. But I really don't know : 
his religion has nothing to do with me." 

Jacobsen was lost in delight and 
admiration. 

Punctually at twenty minutes to eleven 
he set out for church. From where she 
was sitting in the summer-house Marjorie 
watched him as he crossed the garden, 
incredibly absurd and incongruous in his 
black clothes among the blazing flowers 
and the young emerald of the trees. Now 
he was hidden behind the sweet-briar 
hedge, all except the hard black melon of 



134 LIMBO 

his bowler hat, which she could see bobbing 
along between the topmost sprays. 

She went on with her letter to Guy. 
" . . . What a strange man Mr. Jacobsen 
is. I suppose he is very clever, but I 
can't get very much out of him. We had 
an argument about religion at breakfast 
this morning ; I rather scored off him. 
He has now gone off to church all by 
himself ; — I really couldn't face the 
prospect of going with him — I hope he'll 
enjoy old Mr. Trubshaw's preaching ! " 

Jacobsen did enjoy Mr. Trubshaw's 
preaching enormously. He always made 
a point, in whatever part of Christendom 
he happened to be, of attending divine 
service. He had the greatest admiration 
of churches as institutions. In their 
solidity and unchangeableness he saw one 
of the few hopes for humanity. Further, 
he derived great pleasure from comparing 
the Church as an institution — splendid, 
powerful, eternal — with the childish 
imbecility of its representatives. How 
delightful it was to sit in the herded 
congregation and listen to the sincere 
outpourings of an intellect only a little 
less limited than that of an Australian 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 135 

aboriginal ! How restful to feel oneself 
a member of a flock, guided by a good 
shepherd — himself a sheep ! Then there 
was the scientific interest (he went to 
church as student of anthropology, as a 
Freudian psychologist) and the philo- 
sophic amusement of counting the un- 
distributed middles and tabulating 
historically the exploded fallacies in the 
parson's discourse. 

To-day Mr. Trubshaw preached a 
topical sermon about the Irish situation. 
His was the gospel of the Morning Post^ 
slightly tempered by Christianity. It 
was our duty, he said, to pray for the Irish 
first of all, and if that had no effect upon 
recruiting, why, then, we must conscribe 
them as zealously as we had prayed before. 

Jacobsen leaned back in his pew^ with a 
sigh of contentment. A connoisseur, he 
recognized that this was the right stuff. 

'' Well," said Mr. Petherton over the 
Sunday beef at lunch, " how did you like 
our dear Vicar ? " 

" He was splendid," said Jacobsen, with 
grave enthusiasm. " One of the best 
sermons I've ever heard." 

" Indeed ? I shall really have to go and 



136 LIMBO 

hear him again. It must be nearly ten 
years since I listened to him." 

" He's inimitable." 

Marjorie looked at Jacobsen carefully. 
He seem^ed to be perfectly serious. She 
was more than ever puzzled by the man. 

The days went slipping by, hot blue 
days that passed like a flash almost with- 
out one's noticing them, cold grey days, 
seeming interminable and without numxber, 
and about which one spoke with a sense 
of justified grievance, for the season was 
supposed to be summer. There was 
fighting going on in France — terrific 
battles, to judge from the headlines in the 
Times ; but, after all, one day's paper was 
very much like another's. Marjorie read 
them dutifully, but didn't honestly take 
in very much ; at least she forgot about 
things very soon. She couldn't keep 
count with the battles of Ypres, and when 
somebody told her that she ought to go 
and see the photographs of the Vindictive^ 
she smiled vaguely and said Yes, without 
remembering precisely what the Vin- 
dictive was — a ship, she supposed. 

Guy was in France, to be sure, but he 
was an Intelligence Officer now, so that 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 137 

she was hardly anxious about him at all. 
Clergymen used to say that the war was 
bringing us all back to a sense of the 
fundamental realities of life. She supposed 
it was true : Guy's enforced absences 
were a pain to her, and the difficulties 
of housekeeping continually increased and 
multiplied. 

Mr. Petherton took a more intelligent 
interest in the war than did his daughter. 
He prided himself on being able to see 
the thing as a whole, on taking an his- 
torical, God's-eye view of it all. He talked 
about it at meal-times, insisting that the 
world must be made safe for democracy. 
Between meals he sat in the library 
working at his monumental History of 
Morals. To his dinner-table disquisi- 
tions Marjorie would listen more or 
less attentively, Jacobsen w^ith an un- 
failing, bright, intelligent politeness. 
Jacobsen himself rarely volunteered a 
remark about the war ; it was taken for 
granted that he thought about it in the 
same way as all other right-thinking folk. 
Between meals he worked in his room 
or discussed the morals of the Italian 
Renaissance with his host. Marjorie 



138 LIMBO 

could write to Guy that nothing was 
happening, and that but for his absence 
and the weather interfering so much with 
tennis, she would be perfectly happy. 

Into the midst of this placidity there 
fell, delightful bolt from the blue, the 
announcement that Guy w^as getting leave 
at the end of July. " Darling," Marjorie 
wrote, " I am so excited to think that you 
will be with me in such a little — such a 
long, long time." Indeed, she was so 
excited and delighted that she realized 
with a touch of remorse how comparatively 
little she had thought of him when there 
seemed no chance of seeing him, how dim 
a figure in absence he was. A week later 
she heard that George White had arranged 
to get leave at the same time so as to 
see Guy. She was glad; George was 
a charming boy, and Guy was so fond 
of him. The Whites were their nearest 
neighbours, and ever since Guy had come 
to live at Blaybury he had seen a great deal 
of young George. 

" We shall be a most festive party," 
said Mr. Petherton. " Roger will be 
coming to us just at the same time as 
Guy." 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 139 

" I'd quite forgotten Uncle Roger," 
said Marjorie. " Of course, his holidays 
begin then, don't they ? " 

The Reverend Roger was Alfred 
Petherton's brother and a master at one 
of our most glorious public schools. 
Marjorie hardly agreed with her father 
in thinking that his presence would add 
anything to the " festiveness " of the 
party. It was a pity he should be coming 
at this particular moment. However, 
we all have our little cross to bear. 

Mr. Petherton was feeling playful. 
" We must bring down," he said, " the 
choicest Falernian, bottled when Glad- 
stone was consul, for the occasion. We 
must prepare wreaths and unguents and 
hire a flute player and a couple of dancing 
girls . . ." 

He spent the rest of the meal in quoting 
Horace, Catullus, the Greek Anthology, 
Petronius, and Sidonius Apollinarius. 
Marjorie's knowledge of the dead lan- 
guages was decidedly Umited. Her 
thoughts were elsewhere, and it was only 
dimly and as it were through a mist that 
she heard her father murmuring — 
whether merelv to himself or with the 



140 LIMBO 

hope of eliciting an answer from some- 
body, she hardly knew — " Let me see : 
how does that epigram go ? — that one 
about the different kinds of fish and 
the garlands of roses, by Meleager, or is 
it Poseidippus ? . . ." 

II 

GUY and Jacobsen were walking 
in the Dutch garden, an in- 
congruous couple. On Guy military 
servitude had left no outwardly visible 
mark ; out of uniform, he still looked 
like a tall, untidy undergraduate ; he 
stooped and drooped as much as ever ; 
his hair was still bushy and, to judge by 
the dim expression of his face, he had not 
yet learnt to think imperially. His khaki 
always looked like a disguise, like the 
most absurd fancy dress. Jacobsen trotted 
beside him, short, fattish, very sleek, and 
correct. They talked in a desultory way 
about things indifferent. Guy, anxious 
for a little intellectual exercise after so 
many months of discipline, had been 
trying to inveigle his companion into 
a philosophical discussion. Jacobsen con- 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 141 

sistently eluded his efforts ; he was too 
lazy to talk seriously ; there was no 
profit that he could see to be got out of 
this young man's opinions, and he had 
not the faintest desire to make a dis- 
ciple. He preferred, therefore, to dis- 
cuss the war and the weather. It irri- 
tated him that people should want to 
trespass on the domain of thought — 
people who had no right to live any- 
where but on the vegetative plane of 
mere existence. He wished they would 
simply be content to be or do^ not try, 
so hopelessly, to think, when only one in 
a million can think with the least profit 
to himself or anyone else. 

Out of the corner of his eye he looked 
at the dark, sensitive face of his com- 
panion ; he ought to have gone into 
business at eighteen, was Jacobsen's 
verdict. It was bad for him to think ; 
he wasn't strong enough. 

A great sound of barking broke upon 
the calm of the garden. Looking up, 
the two strollers saw George White 
running across the green turf of the 
croquet lawn with a huge fawn-coloured 
dog bounding along at his side. 



142 LIMBO 

" Morning," he shouted. He was 
hatless and out of breath. " I was 
taking Bella for a run, and thought I'd 
look in and see how you all were." 

" What a lovely dog ! " Jacobsen ex- 
claimed. 

" An old English mastiff — our one 
aboriginal dog. She has a pedigree going 
straight back to Edward the Confessor." 

Jacobsen began a lively conversation 
with George on the virtues and short- 
comings of dogs. Bella smelt his calves 
and then lifted up her gentle black eyes 
to look at him. She seemed satisfied. 

He looked at them for a little ; they 
were too much absorbed in their doggy 
conversation to pay attention to him. 
He made a gesture as though he had 
suddenly remembered something, gave a 
little grunt, and with a very preoccupied 
expression on his face turned to go 
towards the house. His elaborate piece 
of by-play escaped the notice of the 
intended spectators ; Guy saw that it 
had, and felt more miserable and angry 
and jealous than ever. They would 
think he had slunk off because he wasn't 
wanted — which was quite true — instead 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 143 

of believing that he had something very 
important to do, which was what he had 
intended they should believe. 

A cloud of self-doubt settled upon 
him. Was his mind, after all, worthless, 
and the little things he had written — 
rubbish, not potential genius as he had 
hoped ? Jacobsen was right in pre- 
ferring George's company. George was 
perfect, physically, a splendid creature ; 
what could he himself claim ? 

'^ Pm second-rate," he thought — 
" second-rate, physically, morally, ment- 
ally. Jacobsen is quite right." 

The best he could hope to be was a 
pedestrian literary man with quiet tastes. 

NO, no, no ! He clenched his hands 
and, as though to register his resolve 
before the universe, he said, aloud : 

" I will do it : I will be first-rate, I 
will." 

He was covered with confusion on 
seeing a gardener pop up, surprised from 
behind a bank of rose-bushes. Talking 
to himself — the man must have thought 
him mad ! 

He hurried on across the lawn, entered 
the house, and ran upstairs to his room. 



144 LIMBO 

There was not a second to lose ; he must 
begin at once. He would write some- 
thing — something that would last, solid, 
hard, shining. . . . 

" Damn them all ! I will do it, I 
can . . ." 

There were writing materials and a 
table in his room. He selected a pen — 
with a Relief nib he would be able to go 
on for hours without getting tired — and 
a large square sheet of writing-paper. 

" Hatch House, 
Blaybury, 
Wilts. 
Station : Cogham, 3 miles ; Nobes 
Monacorum, ^^ miles." 

Stupid of people to have their 
stationery printed in red, when black or 
blue is so much nicer ! He inked over 
the letters. 

He held up the paper to the light ; 
there was a watermark, " Pimlico 
Bond.'' What an admirable name for 
the hero of a novel ! Pimlico Bond. . . . 

" There's be-eef in the la-arder 
And du-ucks in the pond ; 
Crying dilly dilly, dilly dilly . . ." 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 145 

He bit the end of his pen. " What I 
want to get/' he said to himself, " is some- 
thing very hard, very external. Intense 
emotion, but one will somehow have got 
outside it." He made a movement of 
hands, arms, and shoulders, tightening 
his muscles in an effort to express to 
himself physically that hardness and 
tightness and firmness of style after 
which he was struggling. 

He began to draw on his virgin paper. 
A woman, naked, one arm lifted over 
her head, so that it pulled up her breast 
by that wonderful curving muscle that 
comes down from the shoulder. The 
inner surface of the thighs, remember, 
is slightly concave. The feet, seen from 
the front, are always a difficulty. 

It would never do to leave that about. 
What would the servants think ? He 
turned the nipples into eyes, drew heavy 
lines for nose, mouth, and chin, slopped 
on the ink thick ; it made a passable face 
now — though an acute observer might 
have detected the original nudity. He 
tore it up into very small pieces. 

A crescendo booming filled the house. 
It was the gong. He looked at his watch. 
10 



146 LIMBO 

Lunch-time, and he had done nothing. 
O God ! . . . 

Ill 

IT was dinner-time on the last even- 
ing of Guy's leave. The un- 
covered mahogany table was like a pool 
of brown unruffled water within whose 
depths flowers and the glinting shapes of 
glass and silver hung dimly reflected. 
Mr. Petherton sat at the head of the 
board, flanked by his brother Roger and 
Jacobsen. Youth, in the persons of 
Marjorie, Guy, and George White, had 
collected at the other end. They had 
reached the stage of dessert. 

" This is excellent port," said Roger, 
sleek and glossy like a well-fed black cob 
under his silken clerical waistcoat. He 
was a strong, thick-set man of about fifty, 
with a red neck as thick as his head. His 
hair was cropped with military closeness ; 
he liked to set a good example to the 
boys, some of whom showed distressing 
" aesthetic " tendencies and wore their 
hair long. 

" I'm glad you like it. I mayn't touch 
it myself, of course. Have another 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 147 

glass." Alfred Petherton's face wore an 
expression of dyspeptic melancholy. He 
was wishing he hadn't taken quite so 
much of that duck. 

" Thank you, I will." Roger took the 
decanter with a smile of satisfaction. 
" The tired schoolmaster is worthy of 
his second glass. WTiite, you look rather 
pale ; I think you must have another." 
Roger had a hearty, jocular manner, 
calculated to prove to his pupils that he 
w^as not one of the slimy sort of parsons, 
not a Creeping Jesus. 

There was an absorbing conversation 
going on at the youthful end of the table. 
Secretly irritated at having been thus 
interrupted in the middle of it, White 
turned round and smiled vaguely at 
Roger. 

" Oh, thank you, sir," he said, and 
pushed his glass forward to be filled. 
The " sir " sUpped out unawares ; it was, 
after all, such a little while since he 
had been a schoolboy under Roger's 
dominion. 

" One is lucky," Roger went on seri- 
ously, ''to get any port wine at all now. 
I'm thankful to say I bought ten dozen 



148 LIMBO 

from my old college some years ago to 
lay down ; otherwise I don't know what 
I should do. My wine merchant tells 
me he couldn't let me have a single 
bottle. Indeed, he offered to buy some 
off me, if Fd sell. But I wasn't having 
any. A bottle in the cellar is worth ten 
shillings in the pocket these days. I 
always say that port has become a 
necessity now one gets so little meat. 
Lambourne ! you are another of our 
brave defenders ; you deserve a second 
glass." 

" No, thanks," said Guy, hardly look- 
ing up. " I've had enough." He went 
on talking to Marjorie — about the 
different views of life held by the French 
and the Russians. 

Roger helped himself to cherries. 
" One has to select them carefully," he 
remarked for the benefit of the unwillingly 
listening George. " There is nothing 
that gives you such stomach - aches as 
unripe cherries." 

" I expect you're glad, Mr. Petherton, 
that holidays have begun at last ? " said 
Jacobsen. 

" Glad ? I should think so. One is 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 149 

utterly dead beat at the end of the summer 
term. Isn't one, White ? '' 

White had taken the opportunity to 
turn back again and hsten to Guy's 
conversation ; recalled, like a dog who 
has started off on a forbidden scent, he 
obediently assented that one did get tired 
at the end of the summer term. 

'' I suppose," said Jacobsen, " you still 
teach the same old things — Caesar, Latin 
verses, Greek grammar, and the rest ? 
We Americans can hardly believe that 
all that still goes on." 

" Thank goodness," said Roger, " wq 
still hammer a little solid stuff into them. 
But there's been a great deal of fuss 
lately about new curriculums and so 
forth. They do a lot of science now and 
things of that kind, but I don't believe 
the children learn anything at all. It's 
pure waste of time." 

" So is all education, I dare say," said 
Jacobsen lightly. 

" Not if you teach them discipline. 
That's what's wanted — discipline. Most 
of these little boys need plenty of beat- 
ing, and they don't get enough now. 
Besides, if you can't hammer knowledge 



150 LIMBO 

in at their heads, you can at least beat 
a Httle in at their tails." 

'^ You're very ferocious, Roger," said 
Mr. Petherton, smiling. He was feeling 
better ; the duck was settling down. 

'' No, it's the vital thing. The best 
thing the war has brought us is discipline. 
The country had got slack and wanted 
tightening up." Roger's face glowed 
with zeal. 

From the other end of the table 
Guy's voice could be heard saying, " Do 
you know Cesar Franck's ' Dieu s'avance 
a travers la lande ' ? It's one of 
the finest bits of religious music I 
know." 

Mr. Petherton's face lighted up ; he 
leaned forward. '^ No," he said, throw- 
ing his answer unexpectedly into the 
midst of the young people's conversation. 
'' I don't know it ; but do you know 
this ? Wait a minute." He knitted 
his brows, and his lips moved as though 
he were trying to recapture a formula. 
" Ah, I've got it. Now, can you tell 
me this ? The name of what famous 
piece of religious music do I utter when 
I order an old carpenter, once a Liberal 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER i;i 



:>^ 



but now a renegade to Conservatism, to 
make a hive for bees ? " 

Guy gave it up ; his guardian beamed 
dehghtedly. 

" Hoary Tory, oh, Judas ! Make a bee- 
house," he said. " Do you see ? Ora- 
torio Judas Maccabeus^ 

Guy could have \\dshed that this bit 
of flotsam from Mr. Petherton's sportive 
youth had not been thus washed up at 
his feet. He felt that he had been peeping 
indecently close into the dark bachvard 
and abysm of time. 

" That w^as a good one," Mr. Petherton 
chuckled. " I must see if I can think of 



some more." 



Roger, who was not easily to be turned 
away from his favourite topic, waited 
till this irrelevant spark of levity had 
quite expired, and continued : " It's a 
remarkable and noticeable fact that you 
never seem to get discipline combined 
with the teaching of science or modern 
languages. Who ever heard of a science 
master having a good house at a school ? 
Scientists' houses are always bad." 

" How very strange ! " said Jacobsen. 

" Strange, but a fact. It seems to me 



152 LIMBO 

a great mistake to give them houses at all 
if they can't keep discipline. And then 
there's the question of religion. Some 
of these men never come to chapel 
except when they're on duty. And then, 
I ask you, what happens when they 
prepare their boys for Confirmation ? 
Why, I've known boys come to me who 
were supposed to have been prepared by 
one or other of these men, and, on asking 
them, I've found that they know nothing 
whatever about the most solemn facts of 
the Eucharist. — May I have some more of 
those excellent cherries please. White ? 
— Of course, I do my best in such cases 
to tell the boys what I feel personally 
about these solemn things. But there 
generally isn't the time ; one's life is 
so crowded ; and so they go into Con- 
firmation with only the very haziest 
knowledge of what it's all about. You 
see how absurd it is to let anyone but 
the classical men have anything to do 
with the boys' lives." 

" Shake it well, dear," Mr. Petherton 
was saying to his daughter, who had come 
with his medicine. 

" What is that stuff ? " asked Roger. 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 153 

^' Oh, it's merely my peptones. I can 
hardly digest at all without it, you 
know." 

" You have all my sympathies. My 
poor colleague, Flexner, suffers from 
chronic colitis. I can't imagine how he 
goes on with his work." 

" No, indeed. I find I can do nothing 
strenuous." 

Roger turned and seized once more 
on the unhappy George. " White," he 
said, " let this be a lesson to you. Take 
care of your inside ; it's the secret of a 
happy old age." 

Guy looked up quickly. " Don't 
worry about his old age," he said in a 
strange harsh voice, very different from 
the gentle, elaborately modulated tone 
in which he generally spoke. " He won't 
have an old age. His chances against 
surviving are about fourteen to three if 
the war goes on another year." 

'' Come," said Roger, " don't let's be 
pessimistic." 

" But I'm. not. I assure you, I'm 
giving you a most rosy view of George's 
chance of reaching old age." 

It was felt that Guy's remarks had been 



154 LIMBO 

in poor taste. There was a silence ; 
eyes floated vaguely and uneasily, trying 
not to encounter one another. Roger 
cracked a nut loudly. When he had 
sufficiently relished the situation, 
Jacobsen changed the subject by re- 
marking : 

" That was a fine bit of work by our 
destroyers this morning, wasn't it ? " 

" It did one good to read about it," 
said Mr. Petherton. " Quite the Nelson 
touch." 

Roger raised his glass. " Nelson ! " 
he said, and emptied it at a gulp. " What 
a man ! I am trying to persuade the 
Headmaster to make Trafalgar Day a 
holiday. It is the best way of reminding 
boys of things of that sort." 

" A curiously untypical Englishman 
to be a national hero, isn't he ? " said 
Jacobsen. " So emotional and lacking 
in Britannic phlegm." 

The Reverend Roger looked grave. 
" There's one thing I've never been able 
to understand about Nelson, and that 
is, how a man who was so much the soul 
of honour and of patriotism could have 
been — er — imnaoral with Lady HamiltoUt 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 155 

I know people say that it was the custom 
of the age, that these things meant 
nothing then, and so forth ; but all the 
same, I repeat, I cannot understand how 
a man who was so intensely a patriotic 
Englishman could have done such a 
thing." 

'' I fail to see what patriotism has got to 
do with it," said Guy. 

Roger fixed him with his most peda- 
gogic look and said slowly and gravely, 
" Then I am sorry for you. I shouldn't 
have thought it was necessary to tell an 
Englishman that purity of morals is a 
national tradition : you especially, a 
pubhc-school man." 

" Let us go and have a hundred up at 
billiards," said Mr. Petherton. " Roger, 
will you come ? And you, George, and 
Guy ? " 

" I'm so incredibly bad," Guy insisted, 
'' I'd really rather not." 

'^ So am I," said Jacobsen. 

" Then, Marjorie, you must make the 
fourth." 

The billiard players trooped out ; Guy 
and Jacobsen were left alone, brooding 
over the wreckage of dinner. There was 



156 LIMBO 

a long silence. The two men sat smok- 
ing, Guy sitting in a sagging, crumpled 
attitude, like a half-empty sack abandoned 
on a chair, Jacobsen very upright and 
serene. 

" Do you find you can suffer fools 
gladly ? " asked Guy abruptly. 

" Perfectly gladly." 

" I wish I could. The Reverend Roger 
has a tendency to make my blood boil." 

" But such a good soul," Jacobsen 
insisted. 

" I dare say, but a monster all the same." 

" You should take him more calmly. I 
make a point of never letting myself be 
moved by external things. I stick to my 
writing and thinking. Truth is beauty, 
beauty is truth, and so forth : after ail, 
they're the only things of solid value." 
Jacobsen looked at the young man with a 
smile as he said these words. There is no 
doubt, he said to himself, that that boy 
ought to have gone into business ; what a 
mistake this higher education is, to be 
sure. 

" Of course, they're the only things," 
Guy burst out passionately. '^You can 
afford to say so because you had the luck 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 157 

to be born twenty years before I was, 
and with five thousand miles of good deep 
water between you and Europe. Here 
am I, called upon to devote my life, in a 
very different way from which you devote 
yours to truth and beauty — to devote 
my life to — well, what ? Pm not quite 
sure, but I preserve a touching faith that 
it is good. And you tell me to ignore 
external circumstances. Come and live 
in Flanders a little and try . . ." He 
launched forth into a tirade about agony 
and death and blood and putrefaction. 

^'WTiat is one to do ? " he concluded 
despairingly. ''What the devil is right ? 
I had meant to spend my life writing 
and thinking, trying to create something 
beautiful or discover something true. 
But oughtn't one, after all, if one survives, 
to give up everything else and try to make 
this hideous den of a w^orld a little more 
habitable ? " 

" I think you can take it that a world 
which has let itself be dragooned into this 
criminal folly is pretty hopeless. Follow 
your inclinations ; or, better, go into a 
bank and make a lot of money." 

Guy burst out laughing, rather too 



158 LIMBO 

loudly. " Admirable, admirable ! " he said. 
" To return to our old topic of fools : 
frankly, Jacobsen, I cannot imagine why 
you should elect to pass your time with my 
dear old guardian. He's a charming old 

man, but one must admit " He 

waved his hand. 

" One must live somewhere," said 
Jacobsen. " I find your guardian a most 
interesting man to be with. — Oh, do 
look at that dog ! " On the hearth-rug 
Marjorie's little Pekingese, Confucius, was 
preparing to lie down and go to sleep. 
He went assiduously through the solemn 
farce of scratching the floor, under the 
impression, no doubt, that he was making 
a comfortable nest to lie in. He turned 
round and round, scratching earnestly and 
methodically. Then he lay down, curled 
himself up in a ball, and was asleep in the 
twinkling of an eye. 

" Isn't that too wonderfully human ! " 
exclaimed Jacobsen delightedly. Guy 
thought he could see now why Jacobsen 
enjoyed living with Mr. Petherton. The 
old man was so wonderfully human. 

Later in the evening, when the billiards 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 159 

was over and Mr. Petherton had duly 
commented on the anachronism of intro- 
ducing the game into Anthony and Cleo- 
patra, Guy and Marjorie went for a stroll 
in the garden. The moon had risen above 
the trees and lit up the front of the house 
v/ith its bright pale light that could not 
wake the sleeping colours of the world. 

" Moonlight is the proper architectural 
light/' said Guy, as they stood looking 
at the house. The white light and the 
hard black shadows brought out all the 
elegance of its Georgian symmetry. 

" Look, here's the ghost of a rose." 
Marjorie touched a big cool flower, which 
one guessed rather than saw to be red, a 
faint equivocal lunar crimson. " And, oh, 
smell the tobacco-plant flowers. Aren't 
they delicious ! " 

" I always think there's something very 
mysterious about perfume drifting through 
the dark like this. It seems to come from 
some perfectly different immaterial world, 
peopled by unembodied sensations, phan- 
tom passions. Think of the spiritual 
effect of incense in a dark church. One 
isn't surprised that people have believed 
in the existence of the soul." 



i6o LIMBO 

They walked on in silence. Some- 
times, accidentally, his hand would brush 
against hers in the movement of their 
march. Guy felt an intolerable emotion 
of expectancy, akin to fear. It made him 
feel almost physically sick. 

" Do you remember," he said abruptly, 
" that summer holiday our families spent 
together in Wales ? It must have been 
nineteen four or five. I was ten and you 
were eight or thereabouts.'' 

" Of course I remember," cried 
Marjorie. " Everything. There was 
that funny little toy railway from the 
slate quarries." 

" And do you remember our gold- 
mine ? All those tons of yellow iron- 
stone we collected and hoarded in a cave, 
fully believing they were nuggets. How 
incredibly remote it seems ! " 

" And you had a wonderful process by 
which you tested whether the stuff was real 
gold or not. It all passed triumphantly 
as genuine, I remember ! " 

" Having that secret together first made 
us friends, I believe." 

" I dare say," said Marjorie. '' Four- 
teen years ago— what a time ! And you 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER i6i 

began educating me even then : all 
that stuff you told me about gold-mining, 
for instance." 

" Fourteen years," Guy repeated re- 
flectively, " and I shall be going out agair. 
to-morrow . . ." 

" Don't speak about it. I am so miser- 
able when you're away." She genuinely 
forgot what a delightful summer she had 
had, except for the shortage of tennis. 

" We must make this the happiest 
hour of our lives. Perhaps it may be 
the last we shall be together." Guy 
looked up at the moon, and he perceived, 
wdth a sudden start, that it was a sphere 
islanded in an endless night, not a flat disk 
stuck on a wall not so very far away. It 
filled him wdth an infinite dreariness ; he 
felt too insignificant to live at all. 

" Guy, you mustn't talk like that," said 
Marjorie appealingly. 

'' We've got twelve hours," said Guy in 
a meditative voice, " but that's only clock- 
work time. You can give an hour the 
quality of everlastingness, and spend years 
which are as though they had never been. 
We get our immortality here and now ; 
it's a question of quality, not of quantity. 
II 



i62 LIMBO 

I don't look forward to golden harps or 
anything of that sort. I know that w^hen 
I am dead, I shall be dead ; there isn't 
any afterwards. If I'm killed, my immor- 
tality will be in your memory. Perhaps, 
too, somebody will read the things I've 
written, and in his mind I shall survive, 
feebly and partially. But in your mind I 
shall survive intact and whole." 

" But I'm sure we shall go on living after 
death. It can't be the end." Mar- 
jorie was conscious that she had heard 
those words before. Where ? Oh yes, it 
was earnest Evangeline who had spoken 
them at the school debating society. 

" I wouldn't count on it," Guy replied, 
with a little laugh. " You may get such 
a disappointment when you die." Then 
in an altered voice, " I don't want to die. 
I hate and fear death. But probably 
I shan't be killed after all. All the 
same . . ." His voice faded out. They 
stepped into a tunnel of impenetrable 
darkness between two tall hornbeam 
hedges. He had become nothing but a 
voice, and now that had ceased ; he had 
disappeared. The voice began again, low, 
quick^ monotonous, a little breathless. " I 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 163 

remember once reading a poem by one of 
the old Proven9al troubadours, telling 
how God had once granted him supreme 
happiness ; for the night before he was 
to set out for the Crusade, it had been 
granted him to hold his lady in his arms — 
all the short eternal night through. Ains 
que j'aille oltre mer : when I was going 
beyond sea." The voice stopped again. 
They were standing at the very mouth 
of the hornbeam alley, looking out 
from that close-pent river of shadow 
upon an ocean of pale moonlight. 

" How still it is." They did not speak ; 
they hardly breathed. They became 
saturated with the quiet. 

Marjorie broke the silence. " Do you 
want me as much as all that, Guy ? " All 
through that long, speechless minute she 
had been trying to say the words, re- 
peating them over to herself, longing 
to say them aloud, but paralysed, unable 
to. And at last she had spoken them, 
im^personally, as though through the mouth 
of someone else. She heard them very 
distinctly, and was amazed at the matter- 
of-factness of the tone. 

Guy's answer took the form of a question. 



i64 LIMBO 

" Well, suppose I were killed now," 
he said, " should I ever have really 
lived ? '' 

They had stepped out of the cavernous 
alley into the moonlight. She could see 
him clearly now, and there was something 
so drooping and dejected and pathetic 
about him, he seemed so much of a great, 
overgrown child that a wave of passionate 
pitifulness rushed through her, rein- 
forcing other emotions less maternal. 
She longed to take him in her arms, stroke 
his hair, lullaby him, baby-fashion, to 
sleep upon her breast. And Guy, on his 
side, desired nothing better than to 
give his fatigues and sensibilities to her 
maternal care, to have his eyes kissed fast, 
and sleep to her soothing. In his relations 
with women — but his experience in this 
direction was deplorably small- — he had, 
unconsciously at first but afterwards with 
a realization of what he was doing, played 
this child part. In moments of self- 
analysis he laughed at himself for acting 
the " child stunt," as he called it. Here 
he was — he hadn't noticed it yet — doing 
it again, drooping, dejected, wholly 
pathetic, feeble • • • 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 165 

Marjorie was carried away by her 
emotion. She would give herself to her 
lover, would take possession of her helpless, 
pitiable child. She put her arms round 
his neck, lifted her face to his kisses, 
whispered something tender and inaudible. 

Guy drew her towards him and began 
kissing the soft, warm mouth. He 
touched the bare arm that encircled his 
neck ; the flesh was resilient under his 
fingers ; he felt a desire to pinch it and 
tear it. 

It^ had been just like this with that 
little slut Minnie. Just the same 
— all horrible lust. He remembered a 
curious physiological fact out of Havelock 
Ellis. He shuddered as though he had 
touched something disgusting, and pushed 
her away. 

" No, no, no. It's horrible ; it's odious. 
Drunk with moonlight and sentiment- 
alizing about death. . . . Why not just 
say with Biblical frankness. Lie with me 
— Lie wdth me ? " 

That this love, which was to have been 
so marvellous and new and beautiful, 
should end libidinously and bestially like 
the affair, never remembered without a 



i66 LIMBO 

shiver of shame, with Minnie (the vul- 
garity of her !) — filled him with horror. 

Marjorie burst into tears and ran away, 
wounded and trembling, into the solitude 
of the hornbeam shadow. '' Go away, go 
away,'' she sobbed, with such intensity of 
command that Guy, moved by an im- 
mediate remorse and the sight of tears to 
stop her and ask forgiveness, was con- 
strained to let her go her ways. 

A cool, impersonal calm had succeeded 
almost immediately to his outburst. Criti- 
cally, he examined what he had done, and 
judged it, not without a certain feeling of 
satisfaction, to be the greatest " floater " 
of his life. But at least the thing was done 
and couldn't be undone. He took the 
weak-willed man's delight in the irrevoc- 
ability of action. He walked up and down 
the lawn smoking a cigarette and thinking, 
clearly and quietly — remembering the 
past, questioning the future. When the 
cigarette was finished he went into the 
house. 

He entered the smoking-room to hear 
Roger saying, ". . . It's the poor who 
are having the good time now. Plenty to 
eat, plenty of money, and no taxes to pay. 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 167 

No taxes — that's the sickening thing. 
Look at Alfred's gardener, for instance. 
He gets twenty-five or thirty bob a week 
and an uncommon good house. He's 
married, but only has one child. A man 
like that is uncommonly well oflf. He 
ought to be paying income-tax ; he can 
perfectly well afford it." 

Mr. Petherton was listening somno- 
lently, Jacobsen with his usual keen, 
intelligent politeness ; George was play- 
ing wdth the blue Persian kitten. 

it had been arranged that George 
should stay the night, because it was such 
a bore having to walk that mile and a bit 
home again in the dark. Guy took him 
up to his room and sat down on the bed 
for a final cigarette, while George was un- 
dressing. It was the hour of confidence — 
that rather perilous moment when fatigue 
has relaxed the fibres of the mind, making 
it ready and ripe for sentiment. 

" It depresses me so much," said Guy, 
" to think that you're only twenty and 
that I'mx just on twenty-four. You will 
be young and sprightly when the war 
ends ; I shall be an old antique man." 

" Not so old as all that," George 



i68 LIMBO 

answered, pulling off his shirt. His skin 
was very white, face, neck, and hands 
seeming dark brown by comparison ; 
there was a sharply demarcated high- 
water mark of sunburn at throat and wrist. 

" It horrifies me to think of the time 
one is wasting in this bloody war, growing 
stupider and grosser every day, achieving 
nothing at all. It will be five, six — God 
knows how many — years cut clean out of 
one's life. You'll have the world before 
you when it's all over, but I shall have 
spent my best time." 

" Of course, it doesn't make so much 
difference to me," said George through a 
foam of tooth-brushing; ^^I'm not capable 
of doing anything of any particular value. 
It's really all the same whether I lead a 
blameless life broking stocks or spend my 
time getting killed. But for you, I agree, 
it's too bloody. . . ." 

Guy smoked on in silence, his mind 
filled with a languid resentment against 
circumstance. George put on his pyjamas 
and crept under the sheet ; he had to curl 
himself up into a ball, because Guy was 
lying across the end of the bed, and he 
couldn't put his feet down. 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 169 

" I suppose," said Guy at last, medita- 
tively — " I suppose the only consolations 
are, after all, women and wine. I shall 
really have to resort to them. Only 
women are mostly so fearfully boring and 
wine is so expensive now." 

" But not all women ! " George, it 
was evident, was waiting to get a con- 
fidence off his chest. 

" I gather you've found the ex- 
ceptions." 

George poured forth. He had just 
spent six months at Chelsea — six dreary 
months on the barrack square ; but there 
had been lucid intervals between the 
drills and the special courses, which he 
had filled with many notable voyages of 
discovery among unknown worlds. And 
chiefly, Columbus to his own soul, he 
had discovered all those psychological 
intricacies and potentialities, which only 
the passions bring to light. Nosce 
teipsum^ it has been commanded ; and 
a judicious cultivation of the passions is 
one of the surest roads to self-knowledge. 
To George, at barely twenty, it was all 
so amazingly new and exciting, and Guy 
listened to the story of his adventures 



170 LIMBO 

with admiration and a touch of envy. 
He regretted the dismal and cloistered 
chastity — broken only once, and how 
sordidly ! Wouldn't he have learnt much 
more, he wondered — have been a more 
real and better human being if he had 
had George's experiences ? He would 
have profited by them more than George 
could ever hope to do. There was the 
risk of George's getting involved in a 
mere foolish expense of spirit in a waste 
of shame. He might not be sufficiently 
an individual to remain himself in spite 
of his surroundings ; his hand would be 
coloured by the dye he worked in. Guy 
felt sure that he himself would have 
run no risk ; he would have come, seen, 
conquered, and returned intact and still 
himself, but enriched by the spoils of a 
new knowledge. Had he been wrong 
after all ? Had life in the cloister of his 
own philosophy been wholly unprofit- 
able ? 

He looked at George. It was not 
surprising that the ladies favoured him, 
glorious ephebus that he was. 

" With a face and figure like mine," 
he reflected, " I shouldn't have been able 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 171 

to lead his life, even if I'd wanted to." 
He laughed inwardly. 

" You really must meet her," George 
was saying enthusiastically. 

Guy smiled. " No, I really mustn't. 
Let me give you a bit of perfectly good 
advice. Never attempt to share your 
joys with anyone else. People will 
sympathize with pain, but not with 
pleasure. Good night, George." 

He bent over the pillow and kissed 
the smiling face that was as smooth as a 
child's to his lips. 

Guy lay awake for a long time, and 
his eyes were dry and aching before 
sleep finally came upon him. He spent 
those dark interminable hours thinking 
— ^thinking hard, intensely, painfully. 
No sooner had he left George's room than 
a feeling of intense unhappiness took 
hold of him. " Distorted with misery," 
that was how he described himself ; he 
loved to coin such phrases, for he felt 
the artist's need to express as well as to 
feel and think. Distorted with misery, 
he went to bed ; distorted with misery, 
he lay and thought and thought. He 
had, positively, a sense of physical 



172 LIMBO 

distortion : his guts were twisted, he 
had a hunched back, his legs were 
withered. . . . 

He had the right to be miserable. He 
was going back to France to-morrow, he 
had trampled on his mistress's love, and 
he was beginning to doubt himself, to 
wonder whether his whole life hadn't 
been one ludicrous folly. 

He reviewed his life, like a man about to 
die. Born in another age, he would, he 
supposed, have been religious. He had 
got over religion early, like the measles — 
at nine a Low Churchman, at twelve a 
Broad Churchman, and at fourteen an 
Agnostic — but he still retained the tem- 
perament of a religious man. Intellectu- 
ally he was a Voltairian, emotionally a 
Bunyanite. To have arrived at this 
formula was, he felt, a distinct advance 
in self-knowledge. And what a fool 
he had been with Marjorie! The 
priggishness of his attitude — m.aking her 
read Wordsworth when she didn't want 
to. Intellectual love — his phrases 
weren't ahvays a blessing ; how hope- 
lessly he had deceived himself with 
words ! And now this evening the 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 173 

crowning outrage, when he had behaved 
to her like a hysterical anchorite dealing 
with a temptation. His body tingled, 
at the recollection, with shame. 

An idea occurred to him ; he would 
go and see her, tiptoe downstairs to her 
room, kneel by her bed, ask for her 
forgiveness. He lay quite still imagining 
the whole scene. He even went so far as 
to get out of bed, open the door, which 
made a noise in the process like a pea- 
cock's scream, quite unnerving him, and 
creep to the head of the stairs. He 
stood there a long time, his feet growing 
colder and colder, and then decided that 
the adventure was really too sordidly 
like the episode at the beginning 
of Tolstoy's Resurrection. The door 
screamed again as he returned ; he lay 
in bed, trying to persuade himself that 
his self-control had been admirable and 
at the same time cursing his absence of 
courage in not carrying out what he had 
intended. 

He remembered a lecture he had 
given Marjorie once on the subject of 
Sacred and Profane Love. Poor girl, 
how had she listened in patience ? He 



174 LIMBO 

could see her attending with such a 
serious expression on her face that she 
looked quite ugly. She looked so 
beautiful when she was laughing or 
happy; at the Whites', for instance, 
three nights ago, when George and she 
had danced after dinner and he had sat, 
secretly envious, reading a book in the 
corner of the room and looking superior. 
He wouldn't learn to dance, but always 
wished he could. It was a barbarous, 
aphrodisiacal occupation, he said, and 
he preferred to spend his time and 
energies in reading. Salvationist again ! 
What a much wiser person George had 
proved himself than he. He had no 
prejudices, no theoretical views about 
the conduct of life ; he just lived, 
admirably, naturally, as the spirit or 
the flesh moved him. If only he 
could live his life again, if only he 
could abolish this evening's monstrous 
stupidity. . . . 

Marjorie also lay awake. She too felt 
herself distorted with misery. How 
odiously cruel he had been, and how 
much she longed to forgive him ! Per- 
haps he would come in the dark, when 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 175 

all the house was asleep, tiptoeing into 
the room very quietly to kneel by her 
bed and ask to be forgiven. Would he 
come, she wondered ? She stared into 
the blackness above her and about her, 
willing him to come, commanding him — 
angry and wretched because he was 
so slow in coming, because he didn't 
come at all. They were both of them 
asleep before two. 

Seven hours of sleep make a surprising 
difference to the state of mind. Guy, 
who thought he was distorted for life, 
woke to find himself healthily normal. 
Marjorie's angers and despairs had sub- 
sided. The hour they had together 
between breakfast and Guy's departure 
was filled with almost trivial conversa- 
tion. Guy was determined to say some- 
thing about last's night incident. But it 
was only at the very last moment, when 
the dog-cart was actually at the door, 
that he managed to bring out some 
stammered repentance for what had 
happened last night. 

" Don't think about it," Marjorie had 
told him. So they had kissed and parted, 
and their relations were precisely the 



176 LIMBO 

same as they had been before Guy came 
on leave. 

George was sent out a week or two 
later, and a month after that they heard 
at Blaybury that he had lost a leg — fortun- 
ately below the knee. 

" Poor boy ! " said Mr. Petherton. 
'' I must really write a line to his mother 
at once." 

Jacobsen made no comment, but it 
was a surprise to him to find how much 
he had been moved by the news. George 
White had lost a leg ; he couldn't get 
the thought out of his head. But only 
below the knee ; he might be called 
lucky. Lucky — things are deplorably 
relative, he reflected. One thanks God 
because He has thought fit to deprive one 
of His creatures of a limb. 

" Neither delighteth He in any man's 
legs," eh ? Nous avons change tout 
cela. 

George had lost a leg. There would 
be no more of that Olympian speed and 
strength and beauty. Jacobsen conjured 
up before his memory a vision of the boy 
running with his great fawn-coloured 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 177 

dog across green expanses of grass. How 
glorious he had looked, his fine brown 
hair blowing like fire in the wind of his 
own speed, his cheeks flushed, his eyes 
very bright. And how easily he ran, 
with long, bounding strides, looking 
down at the dog that jumped and 
barked at his side ! 

He had had a perfection, and now it 
w^as spoilt. Instead of a leg he had a 
stump. Moignon^ the French called it ; 
there was the right repulsive sound about 
moignon which was lacking in '' stump." 
Soignonslemoignonenl'oignantd'oignons. 

Often, at night before he went to 
sleep, he couldn't help thinking of George 
and the w^ar and all the millions of 
moignons there must be in the world. 
He had a dreami one night of slimy red 
knobbles, large polyp-like things, growing 
as he looked at them, swelling between 
his hands — moignons^ in^fact. 

George was well enough in the late 
autumn to come home. He had learnt 
to hop along on his crutches very skil- 
fully, and his preposterous donkey-drawn 
bath-chair soon became a famihar object 
in the lanes of the neighbourhood. It 
12 



178 LIMBO 

was a grand sight to behold when George 
rattled past at the trot, leaning forward 
like a young Phoebus in his chariot and 
urging his unwilling beast with voice and 
crutch. He drove over to Blaybury 
almost every day ; Marjorie and he had 
endless talks about life and love and 
Guy and other absorbing topics. With 
Jacobsen he played piquet and discussed 
a thousand subjects. He was always gay 
and happy — that was what especially 
lacerated Jacobsen's heart with pity. 

IV 

THE Christmas holidays had begun^ 
and the Reverend Roger was 
back again at Blaybury. He was sitting 
at the writing-table in the drawing-room, 
engaged, at the moment, in biting the 
end of his pen and scratching his head. 
His face wore an expression of perplexity ; 
one would have said that he was in the 
throes of literary composition. Which 
indeed he was : " Beloved ward of 
Alfred Petherton ..." he said aloud. 
" Beloved ward . . ." He shook his 
head doubtfully. 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 179 

The door opened and Jacobsen came 
into the room. Roger turned round at 
once. 

" Have you heard the grievous news ? " 
he said. 

" No. What ? " 

" Poor Guy is dead. We got the tele- 
gram half an hour ago." 

" Good God ! " said Jacobsen in an 
agonized voice which seemed to show 
that he had been startled out of the calm 
belonging to one who leads the life of 
reason. He had been conscious ever 
since George's mutilation that his defences 
were growing weaker ; external circum- 
stance was steadily encroaching upon him. 
Now it had broken in and, for the moment, 
he was at its mercy. Guy dead. . . . He 
pulled himself together sufficiently to say, 
after a pause, " Well, I suppose it was only 
to be expected sooner or later. Poor 
boy." 

" Yes, it's terrible, isn't it ? " said 
Roger, shaking his head. " I am just 
writing out an announcement to send to 
the Times, One can hardly say ' the 
beloved ward of Alfred Petherton,' can 
one ? It doesn't sound quite right ; 



i8o LIMBO 

and yet one would like somehow to give 
public expression to the deep affection 
Alfred felt for him. ' Beloved ward ' — 
no, decidedly it won't do." 

" You'll have to get round it somehow," 
said Jacobsen. Roger's presence somehow 
made a return to the life of reason easier. 

" Poor Alfred," the other went on. 
" You've no idea how hardly he takes it. 
He feels as though he had given a son." 

" What a waste it is ! " Jacobsen 
exclaimed. He was altogether too deeply 
moved. 

" I have done my best to console Alfred. 
One must always bear in mind for what 
Cause he died." 

" All those potentialities destroyed. 
He was an able fellow, was Guy." 
Jacobsen was speaking more to himself 
than to his companion, but Roger took 
up the suggestion. 

" Yes, he certainly was that. Alfred 
thought he was very promising. It is for 
his sake I am particularly sorry. I never 
got on very well with the boy myself. He 
was too eccentric for my taste. There's 
such a thing as being too clever, isn't 
there ? It's rather inhuman. He used to 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER i8i 

do most remarkable Greek iambics for me 
when he was a hoy. I dare saj^ he was a 
very good fellow under all that cleverness 
and queerness. It's all very distressing, 
very grievous." 

" How was he killed ? " 

'' Died of wounds yesterday morning. 
Do you think it would be a good thing to 
put in some quotation at the end of the 
announcement in the paper ? Something 
like, ' Dulce et Decorum,' or ' Sed Miles, 
sed Pro Patria,' or ' Per Ardua ad 
Astra ' ? " 

" It hardly seems essential," said 
Jacobsen. 

" Perhaps not." Roger's lips moved 
silently ; he was counting. " Forty-two 
words. I suppose that counts as eight 
lines. Poor Marjorie ! I hope she won't 
feel it too bitterly. Alfred told me they 
were unofficially engaged." 

" So I gathered." 

" I am afraid I shall have to break the 
news to her. Alfred is too much upset to 
be able to do anything himself. It will 
be a most painful task. Poor girl ! I 
suppose as a matter of fact they would 
not have been able to marry for some time, 



i82 LIMBO 

as Guy had next to no money. These 
early marriages are very rash. Let me 
see : eight times three shilhngs is one 
pound four, isn't it ? I suppose they 
take cheques all right ? " 

" How old was he ? " asked Jacobsen. 

" Twenty-four and a few months." 

Jacobsen was walking restlessly up 
and down the room. " Just reaching 
maturity ! One is thankful these days to 
have one's own work and thoughts to 
take the mind off these horrors." 

" It's terrible, isn't it ? — terrible. So 
many of my pupils have been killed now 
that I can hardly keep count of the 
number." 

There was a tapping at the French 
window ; it was Marjorie asking to be let 
in. She had been cutting holly and ivy 
for the Christmas decorations, and carried 
a basket full of dark, shining leaves. 

Jacobsen unbolted the big window and 
Marjorie came in, flushed with the cold 
and smiling. Jacobsen had never seen 
her looking so handsome : she was superb, 
radiant, like Iphigenia coming in her 
wedding garments to the sacrifice. 

" The holly is very poor this year," she 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 183 

remarked. '' I am afraid we shan't make 
much of a show with our Christmas 
decorations." 

Jacobsen took the opportunity of slip- 
ping out through the French window. 
Although it was unpleasantly cold, he 
walked up and down the flagged paths of 
the Dutch garden, hatless and overcoatless, 
for quite a long time. 

Marjorie moved about the drawing- 
room fixing sprigs of holly round the 
picture frames. Her uncle watched her, 
hesitating to speak ; he was feeling enor- 
mously uncomfortable. 

'' I am afraid," he said at last, " that 
your father's very upset this morning." 
His voice was husky ; he made an ex- 
plosive noise to clear his throat. 

" Is it his palpitations ? " Marjorie 
asked coolly ; her father's infirmities did 
not cause her much anxiety. 

" No, no," Roger realized that his 
opening gambit had been a mistake. "' No. 
It is — er — a more mental affliction, and 
one which, I fear, will touch you closely 
too. Marjorie, you must be strong and 
courageous ; we have just heard that Guy 
is dead." 



i84 LIMBO 

" Guy dead ? '' She couldn't believe 
it ; she had hardly envisaged the possi- 
bility ; besides, he was on the Staff. " Oh, 
Uncle Roger, it isn't true." 

" I am afraid there is no doubt. The 
War Office telegram came just after you 
had gone out for the holly." 

Marjorie sat down on the sofa and hid 
her face in her hands. Guy dead ; she 
would never see him again, never see him 
again, never ; she began to cry. 

Roger approached and stood, with his 
hand on her shoulder, in the attitude of a 
thought-reader. To those overwhelmed 
by sorrow the touch of a friendly hand 
is often comforting. They have fallen 
into an abyss, and the touching hand 
serves to remind them that life and God 
and human sympathy still exist, however 
bottomless the gulf of grief may seem. 
On Marjorie's shoulder her uncle's hand 
rested with a damp, heavy warmth that 
was peculiarly unpleasant. 

'' Dear child, it is very grievous, I know ; 
but you must try and be strong and 
bear it bravely. We all have our cross to 
bear. We shall be celebrating the Birth 
of Christ in two days' time ; remember 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 185 

with what patience He received the cup 
of agony. And then remember for what 
Cause Guy has given his Hfe. He has 
died a hero's death, a martyr's death, 
witnessing to Heaven against the powers 
of evil." Roger was unconsciously 
slipping into the words of his last sermon 
in the school chapel. " You should feel 
pride in his death as well as sorrow. There, 
there, poor child." He patted her shoulder 
two or three times. " Perhaps it would 
be kinder to leave you now." 

For some time after her uncle's de- 
parture Marjorie sat motionless in the 
same position, her body bent forward, her 
face in her hands. She kept on re- 
peating the words, " Never again," and 
the sound of them filled her with despair 
and made her cry. They seemed to open 
up such a dreary grey infinite vista — 
" never again." They were as a spell 
evoking tears. 

She got up at last and began w^alking aim- 
lessly about the room. She paused in front 
of a little old black-framed mirror that 
hung near the window and looked at her 
reflection in the glass. She had expected 
somehow to look different, to have 



i86 LIMBO 

changed. She was surprised to find her 
face entirely unaltered : grave, melan- 
choly perhaps, but still the same face she 
had looked at when she was doing her hair 
this morning. A curious idea entered 
her head ; she wondered whether she 
would be able to smile now, at this dread- 
ful moment. She moved the muscles of 
her face and was overwhelmed with shame 
at the sight of the mirthless grin that 
mocked her from the glass. What a 
beast she was ! She burst into tears and 
threw herself again on the sofa, burying 
her face in a cushion. The door opened, 
and by the noise of shufHing and tapping 
Marjorie recognized the approach of 
George White on his crutches. She did 
not look up. At the sight of the abject 
figure on the sofa, George halted, un- 
certain what he should do. Should he 
quietly go away again, or should he stay 
and try to say something comforting ? 
The sight of her lying there gave him 
almost physical pain. He decided to 
stav. 

He approached the sofa and stood over 
her, suspended on his crutches. Still 
she did not lift her head, but pressed her 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 187 

face deeper into the smothering blindness 
of the cushion, as though to shut out 
from her consciousness all the external 
world. George looked down at her in 
silence. The little delicate tendrils of 
hair on the nape of her neck were ex- 
quisitely beautiful. 

" I was told about it," he said at last, 
" just now, as I came in. It's too awful. 
I think I cared for Guy more than for 
almost anyone in the world. We both 
did, didn't we ? " 

She began sobbing again. George was 
overcome with remorse, feeling that he 
had somehow hurt her, somehow added 
to her pain by what he had said. " Poor 
child, poor child," he said, almost aloud. 
She was a year older than he, but she 
seemed so helplessly and pathetically 
young now that she was crying. 

Standing up for long tired him, and 
he lowered himself, slowly and painfully, 
into the sofa beside her. She looked up 
at last and began drying her eyes. 

'^ Vm so wretched, George, so speci- 
ally wretched because I feel I didn't act 
rightly towards darling Guy. There 
were times, you know, when I wondered 



i88 LIMBO 

whether it wasn't all a great mistake, 
our being engaged. Sometimes I felt I 
almost hated him. Pd been feeling so 
odious about him these last weeks. And 
now comes this, and it makes me realize 
how awful I've been towards him," She 
found it a relief to confide and confess ; 
George was so sympathetic, he would 
understand. " Pve been a beast." 

Her voice broke, and it was as though 
something had broken in George's head. 
He was overwhelmed with pity ; he 
couldn't bear it that she should suffer. 

" You mustn't distress yourself un- 
necessarily, Marjorie dear," he begged 
her, stroking the back of her hand with 
his large hard palm. " Don't." 

Marjorie went on remorselessly. 
" When Uncle Roger told me just 
now, do you know what I did ? I said 
to myself. Do I really care ? I couldn't 
make out. I looked in the glass to see 
if I could tell from my face. Then 
I suddenly thought I'd see whether I 
could laugh, and I did. And that made 
me feel how detestable I was, and I 
started crying again. Oh, I have been a 
beast, George, haven't I ? " 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 189 

She burst into a passion of tears and 
hid her face once more in the friendly 
cushion. George couldn't bear it at all. 
He laid his hand on her shoulder and 
bent forward, close to her, till his face 
almost touched her hair. " Don't," 
he cried. " Don't, Marjorie. You 
mustn't torment yourself like this. I 
know you loved Guy ; we both loved 
him. He would have v/anted us to be 
happy and brave and to go on with life — 
not make his death a source of hopeless 
despair." There was a silence, broken 
only by the agonizing sound of sobbing. 
" Marjorie, darling, you mustn't cry." 

" There, I'm not," said Marjorie 
through her tears. " I'll try to stop. 
Guy wouldn't have wanted us to cry 
for him. You're right ; he would have 
wanted us to live for him — worthily, in 
his splendid way." 

" We who knew him and loved him 
must make our lives a memorial of him." 
In ordinary circumstances George would 
have died rather than make a remark like 
that. But in speaking of the dead, people 
forget themselves and conform to the 
peculiar obituary convention of thought 



190 LIMBO 

and language. Spontaneously, uncon- 
sciously, George had conformed. 

Marjorie wiped her eyes. " Thank 
you, George. You know so well what 
darling Guy would have liked. You've 
made me feel stronger to bear it. But, 
all the same, I do feel odious for what I 
thought about him sometimes. I didn't 
love him enough. And now it's too late. 
I shall never see him again." The spell 
of that " never " worked again : Marjorie 
sobbed despairingly. 

George's distress knew no bounds. He 
put his arm round Marjorie's shoulders 
and kissed her hair. " Don't cry, 
Marjorie. Everybody feels like that 
sometimes, even towards the people they 
love most. You really mustn't make 
yourself miserable." 

Once more she lifted her face and 
looked at him with a heart-breaking, 
tearful smile. " You have been too sweet 
to me, George. I don't know what I 
should have done without you." 

" Poor darUng ! " said George. " I 
can't bear to see you unhappy." Their 
faces were close to one another, and 
it seemed natural that at this point 



HAPPILY EVER AFTER 191 

their lips should meet in a long kiss. 
" We'll remember only the splendid, 
glorious things about Guy," he went on — 
" what a wonderful person he was, and 
how miuch we loved him." He kissed her 
again. 

" Perhaps our darling Guy is with us 
here even now," said Marjorie, with a look 
of ecstasy on her face. 

" Perhaps he is," George echoed. 

It was at this point that a heavy foot- 
step was heard and a hand rattled at 
the door. Marjorie and George moved 
a little farther apart. The intruder was 
Roger, who bustled in, rubbing his hands 
with an air of conscious heartiness, 
studiously pretending that nothing un- 
toward had occurred. It is our English 
tradition that w^e should conceal our 
emotions. " Well, well," he said. " I 
think we had better be going in to 
luncheon. The bell has gone." 



EUPOMPUS GAVE SPLENDOUR 
TO ART BY NUMBERS 

'' T HAVE made a discovery," said 
J^ Emberlin as I entered his room. 
" What about ? " I asked. 
" A discovery," he repHed, " about Dis- 
coveries.'^^ He radiated an unconcealed 
satisfaction ; the conversation had evi- 
dently gone exactly as he had intended 
it to go. He had made his phrase, and, 
repeating it lovingly — " A discovery about 
Discoveries'^'' — he smiled benignly at me, 
enjoying my look of mystification — 
an expression which, I confess, I had 
purposely exaggerated in order to give 
him pleasure. For Emberlin, in many 
ways so childish, took an especial 
delight in puzzling and nonplussing his 
acquaintances ; and these small triumphs, 
these little " scores " off people afforded 
him some of his keenest pleasures. I 

always indulged his weakness when I 
192 



SPLENDOUR BY NUMBERS 193 

could, for it was worth while being on 
Emberlin's good books. To be allowed 
to listen to his post-prandial conversa- 
tion was a privilege indeed. Not only 
was he himself a consummately good 
talker, but he had also the power of 
stimulating others to talk well. He was 
like some subtle wine, intoxicating just 
to the Meredithian level of tipsiness. In 
his company you would find yourself 
lifted to the sphere of nimble and 
mercurial conceptions ; you would sud- 
denly realize that some miracle had 
occurred, that you were living no longer 
in a dull world of jumbled things but 
somewhere above the hotch-potch in a 
glassily perfect universe of ideas, where 
all was informed, consistent, symmetrical. 
And it was Emberlin who, godlike, had 
the power of creating this new and real 
world. He built it out of words, this 
crystal Eden, w^here no belly-going snake, 
devourer of quotidian dirt, naight ever 
enter and disturb its harmonies. Since I 
first knew Emberlin I have come to have 
a greatly enhanced respect for magic and 
all the formules of its liturgy. If by 
words Emberlin can create a new world 
13 



194 LIMBO 

for me, can make my spirit slough off 
completely the domination of the old, 
why should not he or I or anyone, 
having found the suitable phrases, exert 
by means of them an influence more vul- 
garly miraculous upon the v^orld of 
mere things ? Indeed, when I compare 
Emberlin and the common or garden 
black magician of commerce, it seems 
to me that Emberlin is the greater 
thaumaturge. But let that pass ; I am 
straying from my purpose, which was 
to give some description of the man 
who so confidentially whispered to me 
that he had made a discovery about 
Discoveries. 

In the best sense of the word, then, 
Emberlin was academic. For us who 
knew him his rooms were an oasis of aloof- 
ness planted secretly in the heart of the 
desert of London. He exhaled an atmo- 
sphere that combined the fantastic 
speculativeness of the undergraduate 
with the more mellowed oddity of in- 
credibly wise and antique dons. He was 
immensely erudite, but in a wholly 
unencyclopaedic way — a mine of irrele- 
vant information, as his enemies said 



SPLENDOUR BY NUMBERS 195 

of him. He wrote a certain amount, 
but, like Mallarme, avoided publication, 
deeming it akin to " the offence of ex- 
hibitionism." Once, however, in the 
folly of youth, some dozen years ago, he 
had published a volume of verses. He 
spent a good deal of time now in assidu- 
ously collecting copies of his book and 
burning them. There can be but very 
few left in the world now. My friend 
Cope had the fortune to pick one up the 
other day — a little blue book, which he 
showed me very secretly. I am at a loss 
to understand why Emberlin wishes to 
stamp out all trace of it. There is nothing 
to be ashamed of in the book ; some of the 
verses, indeed, are, in their young ecstatic 
fashion, good. But they are certainly 
conceived in a style that is unlike that of 
his present poems. Perhaps it is that 
which makes him so implacable against 
them. What he writes now for very 
private manuscript circulation is curious 
stuff. I confess I prefer the earlier 
work ; I do not like the stony, hard- 
edged quality of this sort of thing — the 
only one I can remember of his later 
productions. It is a sonnet on a por- 



196 LIMBO 

celain figure of a woman, dug up at 
Cnossus : 

" Her eyes of bright unwinking glaze 
All imperturbable do not 
Even make pretences to regard 
The jutting absence of her stays 
Where many a Syrian gallipot 
Excites desire with spilth of nard. 
The bistred rims above the fard 
Of cheeks as red as bergamot 
Attest that no shamefaced delays 
Will clog fulfilment nor retard 
Full payment of the Cyprian's praise 
Down to the last remorseful jot. 
Hail priestess of we know not what 
Strange cult of Mycenean days ! " 

Regrettably, I cannot remember any of 
Emberlin's French poems. His peculiar 
muse expresses herself better, I think, in 
that language than in her native tongue. 

Such is Emberlin ; such, I should rather 
say, was he, for, as I propose to show, he is 
not now the man that he was when he 
whispered so confidentially to me, as I 
entered the room, that he had made a 
discovery about Discoveries. 

I waited patiently till he had finished 
his little game of mystification and, when 
the moment seemed ripe, I asked him to 



I 



SPLENDOUR BY NUiMBERS 197 

explain himself. Emberlin was ready to 
open out. 

'' Well," he began, " these are the 
facts — a tedious introduction, I fear, but 
necessary. Years ago, when I was first 
reading Ben Jonson's Discoveries^ that 
queer jotting of his, ' Eupompus gave 
splendour to Art by Numbers,' tickled 
my curiosity. You yourself must have 
been struck by the phrase, everybody 
must have noticed it ; and everybody 
must have noticed too that no com- 
mentator has a word to say on the subject. 
That is the way of commentators — the 
obvious points fulsomely explained and 
discussed, the hard passages, about which 
one might want to know something passed 
over in the silence of sheer ignorance. 
' Eupompus gave splendour to Art by 
Numbers ' — the absurd phrase stuck in my 
head. At one time it positively haunted 
me. I used to chant it in my bath, set 
to music as an anthem. It went like this, 
so far as I remember" — and he burst 
into song: ''' Eupompus, Eu-u-pompus 
gave sple-e-e-endour . . .' " and so on, 
through all the repetitions, the dragged- 
out rises and falls of a parodied anthem. 



198 LIMBO 

" I sing you this," he said when he had 
finished, " just to show you what a hold jj 
that dreadful sentence took upon my 
mind. For eight years, off and on, its sense- 
lessness has besieged me. I have looked 
up Eupompus in all the obvious books 
of reference, of course. He is there all 
right — Alexandrian artist, eternized by 
some wretched little author in some 
even wretcheder little anecdote, which at 
the moment I entirely forget ; it had 
nothing, at any rate, to do with the 
embellishment of art by numbers. Long 
ago I gave up the search as hopeless ; 
Eupompus remained for me a shadowy 
figure of mystery, author of some name- 
less outrage, bestower of some forgotten 
benefit upon the art that he practised. 
His history seemed wrapt in an im- 
penetrable darkness. And then yesterday 
I discovered all about him and his art 
and his numbers. A chance discovery, 
than which few things have given me a 
greater pleasure. 

" I happened upon it, as I say, yesterday 
when I was glancing through a volume of 
Zuylerius. Not, of course, the Zuylerius 
one knows," he added quickly, " other- 



SPLENDOUR BY NUMBERS 199 

wise one would have had the heart out 
of Eupompus' secret years ago." 

" Of course," I repeated, " not the 
familiar Zuvlerius." 

" Exactly," said EmberHn, taking 
seriously my flippancy, " not the familiar 
John Zuylerius, Junior, but the elder 
Henricus Zuylerius, a much less — though 
perhaps undeservedly so — renowned 
figure than his son. But this is not the 
time to discuss their respective merits. 
At anv rate, I discovered in a volume of 
critical dialogues by the elder Zuylerius, 
the reference, to which, without doubt, 
Jonson was referring in his note. (It was 
of course a mere jotting, never meant to 
be printed, but which Jonson's literary 
executors pitched into the book with all 
the rest of the available posthumous 
materials.) ' Eupompus gave splendour 
to Art by Numbers ' — Zuylerius gives 
a verv circumstantial account of the 
process. He must, I suppose, have found 
the sources for it in some writer now lost 
to us." 

Emberlin paused a moment to muse. 
The loss of the work of any ancient writer 
gave him the keenest sorrow. I rather 



200 LIMBO 

believe he had written a version of the 
unrecovered books of Petronius. Some 
day I hope I shall be permitted to see 
what conception Emberlin has of the 
Satyricon as a whole. He would, I am 
sure, do Petronius justice — almost too 
much, perhaps. 

" What was the story of Eupompus ? '' 
I asked, " I am all curiosity to know." 

Emberlin heaved a sigh and went on. 

" Zuylerius' narrative," he said, " is 
very bald, but on the whole lucid ; and I 
think it gives one the main points of the 
story. I will give it you in my own words ; 
that is preferable to reading his Dutch 
Latin. Eupompus, then, was one of 
the most fashionable portrait-painters of 
Alexandria. His clientele was large, his 
business immensely profitable. For a 
half-length in oils the great courtesans 
would pay him a month's earnings. He 
would paint likenesses of the merchant 
princes in exchange for the costliest of their 
outlandish treasures. Coal-black poten- 
tates would come a thousand miles out of 
Ethiopia to have a miniature limned on 
some specially choice panel of ivory ; 
and for payment there would be camel- 



SPLENDOUR BY NUMBERS 201 

loads of gold and spices. Fame, riches, 
and honour came to him while he was yet 
young ; an unparalleled career seemed 
to lie before him. And then, quite 
suddenly, he gave it all up — refused to 
paint another portrait. The doors of his 
studio were closed. It was in vain that 
clients, however rich, however distin- 
guished, demanded admission ; the slaves 
had their order ; Eupompus would see no 
one but his own intimates." 

Emberlin made a pause in his narrative. 

" What was Eupompus doing ? " I 
asked. 

^' He was, of course," said Emberlin, 
" occupied in giving splendour to Art 
by Numbers. And this, as far as I can 
gather from Zuylerius, is how it all hap- 
pened. He just suddenly fell in love 
with numbers — head over ears, amorous 
of pure counting. Number seemed to 
him to be the sole reality, the only thing 
about which the mind of man could be 
certain. To count was the one thing 
worth doing, because it was the one 
thing you could be sure of doing right. 
Thus, art, that it may have any value at 
all, must ally itself with reality — must, 



202 LIMBO 

that is, possess a numerical foundation. 
He carried the idea into practice hy paint- 
ing the first picture in his new style. It 
was a gigantic canvas, covering several 
hundred square feet — I have no doubt 
that Eupompus could have told you the 
exact area to an inch — and upon it was 
represented an illimitable ocean covered, 
as far as the eye could reach in every 
direction, with a multitude of black 
swans. There were thirty-three thou- 
sand of these black swans, each, even 
though it might be but a speck on 
the horizon, distinctly limned. In the 
middle of the ocean was an island, upon 
which stood a more or less human figure 
having three eyes, three arms and legs, 
three breasts and three navels. In the 
leaden sky three suns were dimly ex- 
piring. There was nothing more in the 
picture ; Zuylerius describes it exactly. 
Eupompus spent nine months of hard 
work in painting it. The privileged 
few who were allowed to see it pro- 
nounced it, finished, a masterpiece. 
They gathered round Eupompus in a 
little school, calling themselves the Phil- 
arithmics. They would sit for hours in 



SPLENDOUR BY NUMBERS 203 

front of his great work, contemplating 
the swans and counting them ; accord- 
ing to the Philarithmics, to count and 
to contemplate were the same thing. 

Eupompus' next picture, represent- 
ing an orchard of identical trees set in 
quincunxes, was regarded with less 
favour by the connoisseurs. His studies 
of crowds were, however, more highly 
esteemed ; in these were portrayed 
masses of people arranged in groups 
that exactly imitated the number and 
position of the stars making up various 
of the more famous constellations. And 
then there was his famous picture of the 
amphitheatre, which created a furore 
among the Philarithmics. Zuylerius 
again gives us a detailed description. 
Tier upon tier of seats are seen, all 
occupied by strange Cyclopean figures. 
Each tier accommodates more people 
than the tier below, and the number 
rises in a complicated but regular pro- 
gression. All the figures seated in the 
amphitheatre possess but a single eye, 
enorm.ous and luminous, planted in the 
middle of the forehead : and all these 
thousands of single eyes are fixed, in a 



204 LIMBO 

terrible and menacing scrutiny, upon a 
dwarf-like creature cowering pitiably in 
the arena. . . . He alone of the multitude 
possesses two eyes. 

" I would give anything to see that 
picture/' Emberlin added, after a pause. 
" The colouring, you know ; Zuylerius 
gives no hint, but I feel somehow certain 
that the dominant tone must have been 
a fierce brick-red — a red granite amphi- 
theatre filled with a red-robed assembly, 
sharply defined against an implacable 
blue sky." 

" Their eyes would be green," I 
suggested. 

Emberlin closed his eyes to visualize 
the scene and then nodded a slow and 
rather dubious assent. 

" Up to this point," Emberlin re- 
sumed at length, " Zuylerius' account is 
very clear. But his descriptions of the 
later philarithmic art become extremely 
obscure ; I doubt whether he under- 
stood in the least what it was all about. 
I will give you such meaning as I manage 
to extract from his chaos. Eupompus 
seems to have grown tired of painting 
merely numbers of objects. He wanted 



SPLENDOUR BY NUMBERS 205 

now to represent Number itself. And 
then he conceived the plan of rendering 
visible the fundamental ideas of life 
through the medium of those purely 
numerical terms into which, according 
to him, they must ultimately resolve 
themselves. Zuylerius speaks vaguely of 
a picture of Eros, which seems to have 
consisted of a series of interlacing planes. 
Eupompus' fancy seems next to have 
been taken by various of the Socratic 
dialogues upon the nature of general 
ideas, and he made a series of illustra- 
tions for them in the same arithmo- 
geometric style. Finally there is 
Zuylerius' wild description of the last 
picture that Eupompus ever painted. I 
can make very little of it. The subject 
of the work, at least, is clearly stated ; it 
was a representation of Pure Number, or 
God and the Universe, or whatever you 
like to call that pleasingly inane con- 
ception of totality. It was a picture of 
the cosmos seen, I take it, through a 
rather Neoplatonic camera obscura — 
very clear and in small. Zuylerius 
suggests a design of planes radiating out 
from a single point of light. I dare 



2o6 LIMBO 

say something of the kind came in. 
Actually, I have no doubt, the work was 
a very adequate rendering in visible form 
of the conception of the one and the 
many, with all the intermediate stages of 
enlightenment between matter and the 
Fons Deitatis. However, it's no use 
speculating what the picture may have 
been going to look like. Poor old 
Eupompus went mad before he had 
completely finished it and, after he had 
dispatched two of the admiring Phil- 
arithmics with a hammer, he flung him- 
self out of the window and broke his 
neck. That was the end of him, and 
that was how he gave splendour, re- 
grettably transient, to Art by Numbers." 
Emberlin stopped. We brooded over 
our pipes in silence ; poor old Eu- 
pompus ! 

That was four months ago, and to-day 
Emberlin is a confirmed and apparently 
irreclaimable Philarithmic, a quite whole- 
hearted Eupompian. 

It was always Emberlin's way to take 
up the ideas that he finds in books and 
to put them into practice. He was once, 



SPLENDOUR BY NUMBERS 207 

for example, a working alchemist, and 
attained to considerable proficiency in 
the Great Art. He studied mnemonics 
under Bruno and Raymond Lully, and 
constructed for himself a model of the 
latter's syllogizing machine, in hopes of 
gaining that universal knowledge which 
the Enlightened Doctor guaranteed to its 
user. This time it is Eupompianism, and 
the thing has taken hold of him. I have 
held up to him all the hideous warnings 
that I can find in history. But it is no 
use. 

There is the pitiable spectacle of Dr. 
Johnson under the tyranny of an Eu- 
pompian ritual, counting the posts and 
the paving-stones of Fleet Street. He 
himself knev/ best how nearly a madman 
he was. 

And then I count as Eupompians all 
gamblers, all calculating boys, all inter- 
preters of the prophecies of Daniel and 
the Apocalypse ; then too the Elberfeld 
horses, most complete of all Eupompians. 

And here was Emberlin joining himself 
to this sect, degrading himself to the 
level of counting beasts and irrational 
children and men, more or less insane. 



2o8 LIMBO 

Dr. Johnson was at least born with a 
strain of the Eupompian aberration in 
him ; Emberlin is busily and consciously 
acquiring it. My expostulations, the 
expostulations of all his friends, are as 
yet unavailing. It is in vain that I tell 
Emberlin that counting is the easiest thing 
in the world to do, that when I am utterly 
exhausted, my brain, for lack of ability to 
perform any other work, just counts and 
reckons, like a machine, like an Elberfeld 
horse. It all falls on deaf ears ; Emberlin 
merely smiles and shows me some new 
numerical joke that he has discovered. 
Emberlin can never enter a tiled bathroom 
now without counting how many courses of 
tiles there are from floor to ceiling. He 
regards it as an interesting fact that there 
are twenty-six rows of tiles in his bathroom 
and thirty-two in mine, while all the public 
lavatories in Holborn have the same 
number. He knows now how many paces 
it is from any one point in London to any 
other. I have given up going for walks 
with him. I am always made so distress- 
ingly conscious by his preoccupied look, 
that he is counting his steps. 

His evenings, too, have become pro- 



SPLENDOUR BY NUMBERS 209 

foundly melancholy ; the conversation, 
however well it may begin, always comes 
round to the same nauseating subject. 
We can never escape numbers ; Eupompus 
haunts us. It is not as if we were mathe- 
maticians and could discuss problems of 
any interest or value. No, none of us are 
mathematicians, least of all Emberlin. 
Emberlin likes talking about such points as 
the numerical significance of the Trinity, 
the immense importance of its being three 
in one, not forgetting the even greater 
importance of its being one in three. He 
likes giving us statistics about the speed 
of light or the rate of growth in finger- 
nails. He loves to speculate on the nature 
of odd and even numbers. And he seems 
to be unconscious how much he has 
changed for the worse. He is happy in 
an exclusively absorbing interest. It is 
as though some mental leprosy had fallen 
upon his intelligence. 

In another year or so, I tell Emberlin, 
he may almost be able to compete with 
the calculating horses on their own ground. 
He will have lost all traces of his reason, 
but he will be able to extract cube roots 
in his head. It occurs to me that the 

14 



2IO LIMBO 

reason why Eupompus killed himself was 
not that he was mad ; on the contrary, 
it was because he was, temporarily, sane. 
He had been mad for years, and then 
suddenly the idiot's self-complacency was 
lit up by a flash of sanity. By its momen- 
tary light he saw into what gulfs of 
imbecility he had plunged. He saw and 
understood, and the full horror, the 
lamentable absurdity of the situation 
made him desperate. He vindicated Eu- 
pompus against Eupompianism, humanity 
against the Philarithmics. It gives me 
the greatest pleasure to think that he 
disposed of two of that hideous crew 
before he died himself. 



HAPPY FAMILIES 

THE scene is a conservatory. Lux- 
uriant tropical plants are seen 
looming through a greenish aquarium 
twilight, punctuated here and there by 
the surprising pink of several Chinese 
lanterns hanging from the roof or on the 
branches of trees, while a warm yellow 
radiance streams out from the ball-room 
by a door on the left of the scene. 
Through the glass of the conservatory, 
at the back of the stage, one perceives a 
black-and-white landscape under the moon 
— expanses of snow, lined and dotted with 
coal-black hedges and trees. Outside is 
frost and death : but within the con- 
servatory all is palpitating and steaming 
with tropical life and heat. Enormous 
fantastic plants encumber it ; trees, 
creepers that writhe with serpentine life, 
orchids of every kind. Everywhere dense 
vegetation ; horrible flowers that look like 
bottled spiders, like suppurating wounds ; 



212 LIMBO 

flowers with eyes and tongues, with mov- 
ing, sensitive tentacles, with breasts and 
teeth and spotted skins. 

The strains of a waltz float in through 
the ball-room door, and to that slow, soft 
music there enter, in parallel processions, 
the two families which are respectively 
Mr. Aston J. Tyrrell and Miss Topsy 
Garrick. 

The doyen of the Tyrrell family is a 
young and perhaps too cultured literary 
man with rather long, dark brown hair, a 
face well cut and sensitive, if a trifle weak 
about the lower jaw, and a voice whose 
exquisite modulations could only be the 
product of education at one of the two 
Great Universities. We will call him 
plain Aston. Miss Topsy, the head of 
the Garrick family, is a young woman of 
not quite twenty, with sleek, yellow hair 
hanging, like a page's, short and thick 
about her ears ; boyish, too, in her 
slenderness and length of leg — boyish, but 
feminine and attractive to the last degree. 
Miss Topsy paints charmingly, sings in a 
small, pure voice that twists the heart and 
makes the bowels yearn in the hearing of 
it, is well educated and has read, or at 



HAPPY FAMILIES 213 

least heard of, most of the best books in 
three languages, knows something, too, of 
economics and the doctrines of Freud. 

They enter arm in arm, fresh from the 
dance, trailing behind them with their 
disengaged hands two absurd ventrilo- 
quist's dummies of themselves. They sit 
down on a bench placed in the middle 
of the stage under a kind of arbour fes- 
tooned with fabulous flowers. The other 
members of the two families lurk in the 
tropical twilight of the background. 

Aston advances his dummy and makes 
it speak, moving its mouth and Hmbs 
appropriately by means of the secret 
levers which his hand controls. 

Aston's Dummy. 
What a perfect floor it is to-night ! 

Topsy's Dummy. 

Yes, it's like ice, isn't it ? And such 
a good band. 

Aston's Dummy. 
Oh yes, a very good band. 



214 LIMBO 

Topsy's Dummy. 

They play at dinner - time at the 
Necropole, you know. 

Aston's Dummy. 

Really ! {A long^ uncomfortable silence.) 
{From under a lofty twangum 
tree emerges the figure of 
Cain Washington Tyrrell, 
Aston's negro brother—for the 
Tyrrells, / regret to say^ have 
a lick of the tar-brush in them 
and Cain is a Mendelian throw- 
back to the "pure Jamaican type. 
Cain is stout and his blackface 
shines with grease. The whites 
of his eyes are like enamel^ his 
smile is chryselephantine. He 
is dressed in faultless evening 
dress and a ribbon of seals 
tinkles on his stomach. He 
walks with legs wide apart^ the 
upper part of his body thrown 
back and his belly projecting^ 
as though he were supporting 
the weight of an Aristophanic 



HAPPY FAMILIES 215 

adores costume. He struts up 
and down in front of the couple 
on the seat J grinning and 
slapping himself on the waist- 
coat^ 

Cain. 

What hair, nyum nyum ! and the 
nape of her neck ; and her body — how 
slender ! and what lovely movements, 
nyum nyum ! {Approaching Aston and 
speaking into his ear.) Eh ? eh ? eh ? 

Aston. 

Go away, you pig. Go away. {He 
holds up his dummy as a shield : Cain 
retires discomfited.) 

Aston's Dummy. 

Have you read any amusing novels 
lately ? 

TOPSY, 

{Speaking over the head of her dummy.) 
No ; I never read novels. They are 
mostly so frightful, aren't they ? 



2i6 ^ LIMBO 

i 

Aston. 

{Enthusiastically .) How splendid ' 
Neither do I. I only write them some- 
times, that's all. {They abandon their 
dummies^ which jail limply into one another^ s 
arms and collapse on to the floor with an 
expiring sigh.) 

TOPSY. 

You write them ? I didn't know. . . . 

Aston. 

Oh, I'd very much rather you didn't 
know. I shouldn't like you ever to read 
one of them. They're all awful : still, 
they keep the pot boiling, you know. 
But tell me, what do you read ? 

ToPSY. 

Mostly history, and philosophy, and a 
little criticism and psychology, and lots 
of poetry. 

Aston. 

My dear young lady ! how wonderful, 
how altogether unexpectedly splendid. 



HAPPY FAMILIES 217 

(Cain emerges zoith the third brother^ Sir 
J'ASPER, who is a paler^ thinner^ more 
sinister and aristocratic Aston.) 



Cain. 

Nyum nyum nyum. . . . 

Sir Jasper. 

What a perfect sentence that was of 
yoiirs, Aston : quite Henry Jamesian ! 
" My dear young lady " — as though you 
were forty years her senior ; and the 
rare old-v/orldliness of that " altogether 
unexpectedly splendid " ! Admirable. 
I don't remember your ever employing 
quite exactly this opening gambit before : 
but of course there were things very like 
it. {^0 Cain.) WTiat a nasty spectacle 
you are, Cain, gnashing your teeth like 
that ! 

Cain. 

Nyum nyum nyum. 

(Aston and Topsy are enthusi- 
astically talking about books : 



2i8 LIMBO 



the two brothers^ finding them- 
selves quite unnoticed^ retire 
into the shade of their twangum 
tree. Belle Garrick has 
been hovering behind Topsy 
for some time fast. She is 
more obviously fretty than her 
sister^ full-bosomed and with 
a loose^ red^ laughing mouth. 
Unable to attract Topsy's 
attention^ she turns round and 
calls^ " Henrika." A f ale face 
with wide^ surprised eyes peeps 
round the trunks hairy like a 
mammotVs leg^ of a kadapoo 
tree with magenta leaves and 
flame - coloured blossoms. This 
is Henrika, Topsy's youngest 
sister. She is dressed in a little 
white muslin frock set off with 
blue ribbons.) 



H 



enrika. 



{Tiptoes forward.) Here I am ; what 
is it ? I was rather frightened of that 
man. But he really seems quite nice and 
tame, doesn't he ? 



HAPPY FAMILIES 219 



Belle. 

Of course he is ! What a goose you are 
to hide like that ! 



Henrika, 

He seems a nice, quiet, gentle man ; 
and so clever. 

Belle. 

What good hands he has, hasn't he ? 
{Approaching Topsy and whispering in her 
ear.) Your hair's going into your eyes, 
my dear. Toss it back in that pretty way 
you have. (Topsy tosses her head ; the 
soft^ golden hell of hair quivers elastically 
about her ears,) That's right ! ,j /, 

Cain. -. ^^^ 



{Bounding into the air and landing with 
feet apart^ knees hent^ and a hand on either 
knee,) Oh, nyum nyum ! 

Aston. 

Oh, the beauty of that movement ! 
It simply makes one catch one's breath 



220 LIMBO 

with surprised pleasure, as the gesture of 
a perfect dancer might. 

Sir Jasper. 

Beautiful, wasn't it ? — a pleasure purely 
aesthetic and aesthetically pure. Listen 
to Cain. 

Aston. 

(To TopsY.) And do you ever try 
writing yourself ? Fm sure you ought 
to. 

Sir Jasper. 

Yes, yes, we're sure you ought to. Eh, 
Cain ? 

ToPSY. 

Well, I have written a little poetry — or 
rather a few bad verses — at one time or 
another. 

Aston. 
Really now ! What about, may I ask ? 



HAPPY FAMILIES 221 

TOPSY. 

Well . . . {hesitating) about different 
things, you know. {She fans herself rather 
nervously.) 

Belle. 

{Leaning over Topsy's shoulder and 
addressing Aston directly.) Mostly about 
Love. {She dwells long and voluptuously 
on the last word^ pronouncing it " low " 
rather than " luvv.'^^) 

Cain. 

Oh, dat's good, dat's good ; dat's dam 
good. {In moments of emotion Cain's 
manners and language savour more obviously 
than usual of the Old Plantation.) Did 
yoh see her face den ? 

Belle. 

{Repeats^ slowly and solemnly.) Mostly 
about Love. 

Henrika. 

Oh, oh. {She covers her face with her 
hands) How could you ? It makes me 
tingle all over. {She runs behind the 
kadapoo tree again.) 



222 LIMBO 

Aston. 

{Very seriously and intelligently.) 
Really. That's very interesting. I wish 
you'd let me see what you've done some 
time. 

Sir Jasper. 

We always like to see these things, don't 
we, Aston ? Do you remember Mrs. 
Towler ? How pretty she was ! And 
the way we criticized her literary pro- 
ductions. . . . 

Aston. 

Mrs. Towler. . . . {He shudders as 
though he had touched something soft and 
filthy.) Oh, don't, Jasper, don't ! 

Sir Jasper. 

Dear Mrs. Towler ! We were very 
nice about her poems, weren't we ? Do 
you remember the one that began : 

" My Love is like a silvern flower-de-luce 

Within some wondrous dream-garden pent : 
God made my lovely lily not for use, 
But for an ornament." 



HAPPY FAMILIES 223 

Even Cain, I believe, saw the joke of 
^ that. 

Aston. 

Mrs. Towler — oh, my God ! But 
this is quite different : this girl really 
interests me. 

Sir Jasper. 

Oh yes, I know, I know. She interests 
you too, Cain, doesn't she ? 



Cain. 

{Prances two or three steeps of a cake-walk 
and sings.) Oh, ma honey, oh, ma honey. 



Aston. 
But, I tell you, this is quite different. 

Sir Jasper. 

Of course it is. Any fool could see that 
it was. Fve admitted it already. 



224 LIMBO 

Aston. 

{To TopsY.) You will show them 
me, won't you ? I should so mxUch like 
to see them. 

ToPSY. 

{Covered with confusion.) No, I really 
couldn't. You're a professional, you see. 

Henrika. 

{From behind the kadapoo tree.) No, 
you mustn't show them to him. They're 
really mine, you know, a great many of 
them. 

Belle. 

Nonsense ! {She stoops down and moves 
TovsY^s foot in such a way that a very well- 
shaped^ white- stockinged leg is visible some 
way up the calf. Then^ to Topsy.) Pull 
your skirt down, my dear. You're quite 
indecent. 

Cain. 

{putting up his monocle^ Oh, nyum 
nyum, ma honey ! Come wid me to 
Dixie Land. . . . 



HAPPY FAMILIES 225 

Sir Jasper. 
H'm, a little conscious, don't you think ? 

Aston. 

But even professionals are human, my 
dear young lady. And perhaps I might 
be able to give you some help with your 
writings. 

TOPSY. 

That's awfully kind of you, Mr. 
Tyrrell. 

Henrika. 

Oh, don't let him see them. I don't 
want him to. Don't let him. 

Aston. 

{With heavy charm.) It always 
interests me so much when I hear of the 
young — and I trust you won't be offended 
if I include you in their number — when I 
hear of the young taking to writing. It is 
one of the most important duties that we 
of the older generation can perform — to 
help and encourage the young with their 
15 



226 LIMBO 

work. It's a great service to the cause of 
Art. 

Sir Jasper. 

That was what I was always saying to 
Mrs. Towler, if I remember rightly. 

TOPSY. 

I can't tell you, Mr. Tyrrell, how 
delightful it is to have one's work taken 
seriously. I am so grateful to you. May 
I send you my little efforts, then ? 

Cain. 

{Executes a step dance to the furious 
clicking oj a pair of bones.) 

Sir Jasper. 

I congratulate you, Aston. A most 
masterful bit of strategy. 

Belle. 

I wonder what he'll do next. Isn't it 
exciting ? Topsy, toss your head again. 
That's right. Oh, I wish something 
would happen ! 



HAPPY FAMILIES 227 

Henrika. 

What have you done ? Oh, Topsy, you 
really mustn't send him my poems. 



Belle. 

You said he was such a nice man just 
now. 

Henrika. 

Oh yes, he's nice, I know. But then he's 
a man, you must admit that. I don't want 
him to see them. 



TOPSY. 

{Firmly.) You're being merely foolish, 
Henrika. Mr. Tyrrell, a very dis- 
tinguished literary man, has been kind 
enough to take an interest in my work. 
His criticism will be the greatest help to 
me. 

Belle. 

Of course it will, and he has such 
charming eyes. {A pause. The music^ 



228 LIMBO 

which has^ all this while^ heenjaintly heard, 
through the hall-room door^ becomes more 
audible. They are flaying a rich^ 
creamy waltz.) What delicious music ! 
Henrika, come and have a dance. (She 
seizes Henrika round the waist and begins to 
waltz. Henrika is reluctant at first ^ but 
little by little the rhythm of the dance takes 
possession of her till^ with her half- closed 
eyes and languorous ^ trance-like movements^ 
she might figure as the visible living symbol 
of the waltz. Aston and Topsy lean back 
in their seats^ marking the time with a 
languid beating of the hand. Cain sways 
and swoons and revolves in his own peculiar 
and inimitable version of the danced 

Sir Jasper. 

(JVho has been watching the whole scene 
with amusement^ What a pretty spectacle ! 
" Music hath charms. ..." 



Henrika. 

{In an almost extinct voice ^ Oh, Belle, 
Belle, I could go on dancing like this for 
ever. I feel quite intoxicated with it. 



HAPPY FAMILIES 229 

TOPSY. 

{Jo Aston.) What a jolly tune this is ! 

Aston. 

Isn't it? It's called '' Dreams of Desire," 
I believe. 

Belle. 

What a pretty name ! 

ToPSY. 

These are wonderful flowers here. 

Aston. 

Let's go and have a look at them. 

{They get up and walk round the 
conservatory, The jiowers 
light up as they pass ; in the 
midst oj each is a small electric 
globe.) 

Aston. 

This purple one with eyes is the 
assafoetida flower. Don't put your nose 
too near ; it has a smell like burning flesh. 



230 LIMBO 

This is a Cypripedium from Sumatra. It 
is the only man-eating flower in the world. 
Notice its double set of teeth. {He puts 
a stick into the mouth of the jiomer^ which 
instantly snaps to^ like a steel trap.) Nasty, 
vicious brute ! These blossoms like 
purple sponges belong to the twangum 
tree ; when you squeeze them they ooze 
blood. This is the Jonesia, the octopus 
of the floral world : each of its eight 
tentacles is armed with a sting capable 
of killing a horse. Now this is a most 
interesting and instructive flower — the 
patchouli bloom. It is perhaps the most 
striking example in nature of structural 
specialization brought about by Evolution. 
If only Darwin had lived to see the patch- 
ouli plant ! You have heard of flowers 
specially adapting themselves to be 
fertilized by bees or butterflies or spiders 
and such-like ? Well, this plant which 
grows in the forests of Guatemala can only 
be fertilized by English explorers. Ob- 
serve the structure of the flower ; at 
the base is a flat, projecting pan, con- 
taining the pistil ; above it an over- 
arching tube ending in a spout. On 
either side a small crevice about three- 



HAPPY FAMILIES 231 

quarters of an inch in length may be 
discerned in the fleshy lobes of the calyx. 
The English traveller seeing this plant is 
immediately struck by its resemblance 
to those penny - in - the - slot machines 
which provide scent for the public in the 
railway stations at home. Through sheer 
force of habit he takes a penny from his 
pocket and inserts it in one of the crevices 
or slots. Immediate result — a jet of 
highly scented liquid pollen is discharged 
from the spout upon the pistil lying below, 
and the plant is fertilized. Could any- 
thing be more miraculous ? And yet 
there are those who deny the existence of 
God. Poor fools ! 

TOPSY. 

Wonderful ! {Sniffing.) What a good 
scent. 

AsTON. 

The purest patchouli. 

Belle. 

How delicious ! Oh, my dear . . . {She 
shuts her eyes in ecstasy.) 



232 LIMBO 

Henrika. 
{Drowsily.) Delicious, 'licious. . . . 

Sir Jasper. 

I always like these rather canaille per- 
fumes. Their effect is admirable. 

Aston. 

This is the leopard-flower. Observe 
its spotted skin and its thorns like agate 
claws. This is the singing Alocusia — 
Alocusia Cantatrix — discovered by Hum- 
boldt during his second voyage to the 
Amazons. If you stroke its throat in the 
right place, it will begin to sing like a 
nightingale. Allow me. {He takes her by 
the wrist and guides her fingers towards the 
palpitating throat of a gigantic flower 
shaped like a gramophone trumpet. The 
Alocusia hursts into song ; it has a voice like 
Caruso^s.) 

Cain. 

Oh, nyum nyum ! What a hand ! Oh, 
ma honey. {He runs a thick black finger 
along Topsy's arm.) 



HAPPY FAMILIES 233 

TOPSY. 

What a remarkable flower ! 

Belle. 

I wonder whether he stroked my arm 
like that by accident or on purpose. 

Henrika. 

{Gives a little shiver^ He's touching 
me. he's touching me ! But somehow I 
feel so sleepy I can't move. 

ToPSY. 

{^he moves on towards the next flower : 
Belle does not allow her to disengage her 
hand at once.) What a curious smell this 
one has ! 

Aston. 

Be careful, be careful ! That's the 
chloroform plant. 



234 LIMBO 

TOPSY. 

Oh, I feel quite dizzy and faint. That 
smell and the heat . . . {She almost falls : 
Aston futs out his arm and holds her up.) 

Aston. 

Poor child ! 

Cain. 

Poh chile, poh chile ! {He hovers round 
her^ his hands almost touching her^ trembling 
with excitement : his white eyeballs roll 
horribly.) 

Aston. 

I'll open the door. The air will make 
you feel better. {He opens the con- 
servatory door^ still supporting Topsy with 
his right arm. The wind is heard^ fearfully 
whistling : a flurry of snow blows into the 
conservatory. The flowers utter piercing 
screams of rage and fear ; their lights 
flicker wildly ; several turn perfectly black 
and drop on to the floor writhing in agony. 
The floral octopus agitates its tentacles ; the 
twangum blooms drip blood ; all the leaves 



HAPPY FAMILIES 235 

of all the trees claf together with a dry^ scaly 
sound.) 

TOPSY. 

{Faintly.) Thank you ; that's better. 

Aston. 

{Closing the door.) Poor child ! Come 
and sit down again ; the chloroform 
flower is a real danger. {Much moved^ 
he leads her hack towards the seat.) 



Cain. 

{Executes a war dance round the seated 
couple.) Poh chile, poh chile ! Nyum 
nyum nyum. 

Sir Jasper. 

One perceives the well-known dangers 
of playing the Good Samaritan towards 
an afflicted member of the opposite sex. 
Pity has touched even our good Cain to 
tears. 



236 LIMBO 

Belle. 

Oh, I wonder what's going to happen! 
It's so exciting. Pm so glad Henrika's 
gone to sleep. 

TOPSY. 

It was silly of me to go all faint like that. 

Aston. 

I ought to have warned you in time of 
the chloroform flower. 

Belle. 

But it's such a lovely feeling now — like 
being in a very hot bath with lots of 
verbena bath-salts, and hardly able to move 
with limpness, but just ever so comfortable 
and happy. 

Aston. 

How do you feel now ? I'm afraid 
you're looking very pale. Poor child! 



HAPPY FAMILIES 237 

Cain. 
Poh chile, poh chile! . . . 

Sir Jasper. 

I don't know much about these things, 
but it seems to me, my dear Aston, that 
the moment has decidedly arrived. 

Aston. 

I'm so sorry. You poor little thing . . . 

{He kisses her very gently on the forehead.) 

Belle. 

A — a — h. 

Henrika. 

Oh ! He kissed me : but he's so kind 
and good, so kind and good. {She stirs 
and falls hack again into her drowsy trance.) 

Cain. 

Poh chile, poh chile ! {He leans over 
Aston's shoulder and begins rudely kissing 



238 LIMBO 

Topsy's trance-calm^ farted, lips. Topsy 
opens her eyes and sees the blacky greasy face^ 
the chryselephantine smile^ the pink^ thick 
lips^ the goggling eyeballs of white enamel. 
She screams. Henrika springs up and 
screams too. Topsy slips on to the floor ^ 
and Cain and Aston are left face to face 
with Henrika, pale as death and with wide- 
open^ terrified eyes. She is trembling in 
every limb.) 

Aston. 

{Gives Cain a push that sends him 
sprawling backwards^ and falls on his knees 
before the pathetic figure of Henrika.) 
Oh, Fm so sorry, I'm so sorry. What a 
beast I am ! I don't know what I can 
have been thinking of to do such a thing. 

Sir Jasper. 

My dear boy, I'm afraid you and Cain 
knew only too well what you were think- 
ing of. Only too well . . . 

Aston. 

Will you forgive me ? I can't forgive 
myself. 



HAPPY FAMILIES 239 

Henrika. 

Oh, you hurt me, you frightened me so 
much. I can't bear it. {She cries.) 



Aston. 

O God ! O God ! {The tears start into 
his eyes also. He takes Henrika's hand 
and begins to kiss it.) I'm so sorry, I'm 
so sorry. 

Sir Jasper. 

If you're not very careful, Aston, you'll 
have Cain to deal with again. (Cain 
has picked himself up and is creeping 
stealthily towards the couple in the centre 
of the conservatory^ 



Aston. 

{Turning round.) Cain, you brute, go 
to hell ! (Cain slinks back.) Oh, will 
you forgive me for having been such a 
3wine ? What can I do ? 



240 LIMBO 

TOPSY. 

(Who has recovered her self-fossession^ 
rises to her feet and pushes Henrika into the 
background.) Thank you, it is really quite 
all right. I think it would be best to say 
no more about it, to forget what has 
happened. 

Aston. 
Will you forgive me, then ? 

ToPSY. 

Of course, of course. Please get up, 
Mr. Tyrrell. 

Aston. 

(Climbing to his feet.) I can't think 
how I ever came to be such a brute. 



ToPSY. 

(Coldly.) I thought we had agreed not 
to talk about this incident any further. 
(There is a silence.) 



HAPPY FAMILIES 241 

Sir Jasper. 

Well, Aston ? This has been rather 
fun. 

Belle. 

I wish you hadn't been quite so cold 
with him, Topsy. Poor man ! He really 
is very sorry. One can see that. 



Henrika. 

But did you see that awful face ? {She 
shudders and covers her eyes.) 



Aston. 

{Picking up his dummy and manipulating 
it) It is very hot in here, is it not ? 
Shall we go back to the dancing-room ? 



TOPSY. 

{Also takes up her dummy.) Yes, let us 
go back. 
16 



242 LIMBO 

Aston's Dummy. 

Isn't that '' Roses in Picardy " that the 
band is playing ? 

Topsy's Dummy. 

I believe it is. What a very good band, 
don't you think ? 

Aston's Dummy. 

Yes ; it plays during dinner, you know^, 
at the Necropole. {^o Jasper.) Lord, 
what a fool I am ! I'd quite forgotten ; 
it v^as she v^ho told me so as we came in. 

Topsy's Dummy. 
At the Necropole ? Really. 

Aston's Dummy. 
A very good band and a very good floor. 

Topsy's Dummy. 

Yes, it's a perfect floor, isn't it ? Like 
glass. . . . {They go out^ followed by 



HAPPY FAMILIES 243 

their respective families. Belle supports 
Henrika, who is still very weak after her 
shock,) 

BellEc 
How exciting it was, wasn't it, Henrika ? 



Henrika. 

Wasn't it awful — too awful ! Oh, 
that face. . . . {Cm^^ follows Aston out in 
silence and dejection. Sir Jasper brings 
up the rear of the procession. His face 
wears its usual expression of slightly bored 
amusement. He lights a cigarette^ 



Sir Jasper. 

Charming evening, charming evening. 
. . . Now it's over, I wonder whether it 
ever existed, {fie goes out. The conserva- 
tory is left empty. The flowers flash their 
luminous pistils ; the eyes of the assa- 
foetida blossoms solemnly wink ; leaves shake 
and sway and rustle ; several of the flowers 



244 LIMBO 

are heard to utter a low chuckle^ while the 

Alocusia^ of ter whistling a few derisive notes^ 

finally utters a loud^ gross Oriental hiccough.) 

The Curtain slowly descends. 



CYNTHIA 

WHEN, some fifty years hence, my 
grandchildren ask me what I 
did when I was at Oxford in the remote 
days towards the beginning of our 
monstrous century, I shall look back 
across the widening gulf of time and tell 
them with perfect good faith that I 
never worked less than eight hours a day, 
that 1 took a keen interest in Social 
Service, and that coffee was the strongest 
stimulant in which I indulged. And 
they will very justly say — but I hope I 
shall be out of hearing. That is why 
I propose to write my memoirs as soon 
as possible, before I have had time to 
forget, so that having the truth before 
me I shall never in tim.e to come be able, 
consciously or unconsciously, to tell lies 
about myself. 

At present I have no time to write a 
complete account of that decisive period 
in my history. I must content myself 



246 LIMBO 

therefore with describing a single inci- 
dent of my undergraduate days. I have 
selected this one because it is curious and 
at the same time wholly characteristic of 
Oxford life before the war. 

My friend Lykeham was an Exhibi- 
tioner at Swellfoot College. He com- 
bined blood (he was immensely proud of 
his Anglo-Saxon descent and the deriva- 
tion of his name from Old English lycam^ 
a corpse) with brains. His tastes were 
eccentric, his habits deplorable, the 
range of his information immense. As 
he is now dead, I will say no more about 
his character. 

To proceed with my anecdote : I had 
gone one evening, as was my custom, to 
visit him in his rooms at Swellfoot. It 
was just after nine when I mounted the 
stairs, and great Tom was still tolling. 

" In Thomae laude 

Resono bim bam sine fraude," 

as the charmingly imbecile motto used 
to run, and to-night he was living up to 
it by bim-bamming away in a persistent 
hasso profondo that made an astonishing 
background of discord to the sound of 



CYNTHIA 247 

frantic guitar playing which emanated 
from Lykeham's room. From the fury 
of his twanging I could tell that some- 
thing more than usually cataclysmic had 
happened, for mercifully it was only in 
moments of the greatest stress that 
Lykeham touched his guitar. 

I entered the room with my hands over 
my ears. " For God's sake '' I im- 
plored. Through the open window Tom 
was shouting a deep E flat, with a spread 
chord of under- and over- tones, while 
the guitar gibbered shrilly and hysteri- 
cally in D natural. Lykeham laughed, 
banged down his guitar on to the sofa 
with such violence that it gave forth a 
trembling groan from all its strings, and 
ran forward to meet me. He slapped 
me on the shoulder with painful hearti- 
ness ; his whole face radiated joy and 
excitement. 

I can sympathize with people's pains, 
but not with their pleasures. There is 
something curiously boring about some- 
body else's happiness. 

" You are perspiring," I said coldly. 

Lykeham mopped himself, but went 
grinning. 



248 LIMBO 

" Well, what is it this time ? " I asked. 
" Are you engaged to be married again ? " 

Lykeham burst forth with the trium- 
phant pleasure of one who has at last 
found an opportunity of disburdening 
himself of an oppressive secret. " Far 
better than that," he cried. 

I groaned. " Some more than usually 
unpleasant amour, I suppose.^' I knew 
that he had been in London the day 
before, a pressing engagement with the 
dentist having furnished an excuse to 
stay the night. 

" Don't be gross," said Lykeham, with 
a nervous laugh which showed that my 
suspicions had been only too well 
founded. 

" Well, let's hear about the delectable 
Flossie or Effie or whatever her name 
was," I said, with resignation. 

" I tell you she was a goddess." 

" The goddess of reason, I suppose." 

" A goddess," Lykeham continued ; 
" the most wonderful creature I've ever 
seen. And the extraordinary thing is," 
he added confidentially, and with ill- 
suppressed pride, " that it seems I my- 
self am a god of sorts." 



CYNTHIA 249 

" Of gardens ; but do come down to facts ." 
"Vl\ tell you the whole story. It was 
like this : Last night I was in town, you 
know, and went to see that capital play 
that's running at the Prince Consort's. 
It's one of those ingenious combinations 
of melodrama and problem play, which 
thrill you to the marrow and at the same 
time give you a virtuous feeling that 
you've been to see something serious. 
Well, I rolled in rather late, having 
secured an admirable place in the front 
row of the dress circle. I trampled in 
over the populace, and casually observed 
that there was a girl sitting next me, 
whom I apologized to for treading on 
her toes. I thought no more about her 
during the first act. In the interval, 
when the lights were on again, I turned 
round to look at things in general and 
discovered that there was a goddess 
sitting next me. One only had to look 
at her to see she was a goddess. She 
w^as quite incredibly beautiful — rather 
pale and virginal and slim, and at the 
same time very stately. I can't describe 
her ; she was simply perfect — there's 
nothing more to be said." 



250 LIMBO 

" Perfect," I repeated, " but so were 
all the rest." 

" Fool ! " Lykeham answered impa- 
tiently. " All the rest were just damned 
women. This was a goddess, I tell you. 
Don't interrupt me any more. As I was 
looking with astonishment at her profile, 
she turned her head and looked squarely 
at me. I've never seen anything so 
lovely; I almost swooned away. Our 
eyes met " 

" What an awful novelist's ex- 
pression ! " I expostulated. 

" I can't help it ; there's no other 
word. Our eyes did meet, and we both 
fell simultaneously in love." 

" Speak for yourself." 

" I could see it in her eyes. Well, 
to go on. We looked at one another 
several times during that first interval, 
and then the second act began. In the 
course of the act, entirely accidentally, 
I knocked my programme on to the 
floor, and reaching down to get it I 
touched her hand. Well, there was 
obviously nothing else to do but to take 
hold of it." 

'' And what did she do ? " 



CYNTHIA 251 

" Nothing. We sat like that the whole 
of the rest of the act, rapturously happy 
and " 

" And quietly perspiring palm to palm. 
I know exactly, so we can pass over that. 
Proceed." 

" Of course you don't know in the 
least ; you've never held a goddess's 
hand. When the lights went up again 
I reluctantly dropped her hand, not 
liking the thought of the profane crowd 
seeing us, and for want of anything 
better to say, I asked her if she actually 
was a goddess. She said it was a curious 
question, as she'd been wondering what 
god I was. So we said, how incredible : 
and I said I was sure she was a goddess, 
and she said she was certain I was a god, 
and I bought some chocolates, and the 
third act began. Now, it being a melo- 
drama, there was of course in the third 
act a murder and burglary scene, in 
which all the lights were turned out. 
In this thrilling moment of total black- 
ness I suddenly felt her kiss me on the 
cheek." 

" I thought you said she was virginal." 
So she was — absolutely, frozenly 



a 



252 LIMBO 

virginal ; but she was made of a sort of 
burning ice, if you understand me. She 
was virginally passionate — just the com- 
bination you'd expect to find in a goddess. 
I admit I was startled when she kissed 
me, but with infinite presence of mind I 
kissed her back, on the mouth. Then 
the murder was finished and the lights 
went on again. Nothing much more 
happened till the end of the show, when 
I helped her on with her coat and we 
went out together, as if it were the most 
obvious thing in the world, and got into 
a taxi. I told the man to drive some- 
where where we could get supper, and he 
drove there.'' 

" Not without embracements by the 
way ? " 

" No, not without certain embrace- 
ments." 

" Always passionately virginal ? " 

" Always virginally passionate." 

" Proceed." 

" Well, we had supper — a positively 
Olympian affair, nectar and ambrosia 
and stolen hand-pressures. She became 
more and more wonderful every moment. 
My God, you should have seen her eyes ! 



CYNTHIA 253 

The whole soul seemed to burn in their 
depths, like fire under the sea " 

" For narrative/' I interrupted him, 
" the epic or heroic style is altogether 
more suitable than the lyrical." 

" Well, as I say, we had supper, and 
after that my memory becomes a sort of 
burning mist." 

" Let us make haste to draw the in- 
evitable veil. What was her name t " 

Lykeham confessed that he didn't 
know ; as she was a goddess, it didn't 
really seem to matter what her earthly 
name was. How did he expect to find 
her again ? He hadn't thought of that, 
but knew she'd turn up somehow. I 
told him he was a fool, and asked which 
particular goddess he thought she was 
and which particular god he himself. 

" We discussed that," he said. '' We 
first thought Ares and Aphrodite ; but 
she wasn't my idea of Aphrodite, and I 
don't know that I'm very much like 
Ares." 

He looked pensively in the old Venetian 
mirror which hung over the fireplace. It 
was a complacent look, for Lykeham was 
rather vain about his personal appearance, 



254 LIMBO 

which was, indeed, repulsive at first 
sight, but had, when you looked again, 
a certain strange and fascinating ugly 
beauty. Bearded, he would have made 
a passable Socrates. But Ares — no, cer- 
tainly he wasn't Ares. 

" Perhaps you're Hephaestus," I sug- 
gested ; but the idea was received coldly. 

Was he sure that she was a goddess ? 
Mightn't she just have been a nymph of 
sorts ? Europa, for instance. Lykeham 
repudiated the implied suggestion that 
he was a bull, nor would he hear of him- 
self as a swan or a shower of gold. It was 
possible, however, he thought, that he 
was Apollo and she Daphne, reincar- 
nated from her vegetable state. And 
though I laughed heartily at the idea 
of his being Phoebus Apollo, Lykeham 
stuck to the theory with increasing 
obstinacy. The more he thought of it 
the more it seemed to him probable that 
his nymph, with her burning cold virginal 
passion, was Daphne, while to doubt that 
he himself was Apollo seemed hardly to 
occur to him. 

It was about a fortnight later, in June, 



CYNTHIA 255 

towards the end of term, that we dis- 
covered Lykeham's Olympian identity. 
We had gone, Lykeham and I, for an 
after-dinner walk. We set out through 
the pale tranquillity of twilight, and 
following the towpath up the river as far 
as Godstow, halted at the inn for a glass 
of port and a talk with the glorious old 
female Falstaff in black silk who kept it. 
We were royally entertained with gossip 
and old wine, and after Lykeham had 
sung a comic song which had reduced 
the old lady to a quivering jelly of 
hysterical laughter, we set out once 
more, intending to go yet a little farther 
up the river before we turned back. 
Darkness had fallen by this time ; the 
stars were lighted in the sky ; it was the 
sort of summer night to which Marlowe 
compared Helen of Troy. Over the 
meadows invisible peewits wheeled and 
uttered their melancholy cry ; the far- 
off thunder of the weir bore a con- 
tinuous, even burden to all the other 
small noises of the night. Lykeham and 
I walked on in silence. We had covered 
perhaps a quarter of a mile when all at 
once my companion stopped and began 



256 LIMBO 

looking fixedly westward towards 
Witham Hill. I paused too, and saw 
that he was staring at the thin crescent 
of the moon, which was preparing to 
set in the dark woods that crowned the 
eminence. 

" What are you looking at ? " I asked. 

But Lykeham paid no attention, only 
muttered something to himself. Then 
suddenly he cried out, " It's she ! '' and 
started off at full gallop across the fields 
in the direction of the hill. Conceiving 
that he had gone suddenly mad, I fol- 
lowed. We crashed through the first 
hedge twenty yards apart. Then came 
the backwater ; Lykeham leapt, flopped 
in three-quarters of the way across, and 
scrambled oozily ashore. I made a 
better jump and landed among the mud 
and rushes of the farther bank. Two 
more hedges and a ploughed field, a hedge, 
a road, a gate, another field, and then we 
were in Witham Wood itself. It was 
pitch black under the trees, and Lykeham 
had perforce to slacken his pace a little. 
I followed him by the noise he made 
crashing through the undergrowth and 
cursing when he hurt himself. That 



CYNTHIA 257 

wood was a nightmare, but we got through 
it somehow and into the open glade at 
the top of the hill. Through the trees 
on the farther side of the clearing shone 
the moon, seeming incredibly close at 
hand. Then, suddenly, along the very 
path of the moonlight, the figure of a 
woman came walking through the trees 
into the open. Lykeham rushed towards 
her and flung himself at her feet and 
embraced her knees ; she stooped down 
and smoothed his ruffled hair. I turned 
and walked away ; it is not for a mere 
mortal to look on at the embracements 
of the gods. 

As I walked back, I wondered who on 
earth — or rather who in heaven — Lyke- 
ham could be. For here was chaste 
Cynthia giving herself to him in the 
most unequivocal fashion. Could he be 
Endymion ? No, the idea was too pre- 
posterous to be entertained for a moment. 
But I could think of no other loved by 
the virgin moon. Yet surely I seemed 
dimly to recollect that there had been 
some favoured god ; for the life of me 
I could not remember who. All the 
way back along the river path I searched 

17 



258 LIMBO 

my mind for his name, and always it 
eluded me. 

But on my return I looked up the 
matter in Lempriere, and almost died of 
laughing when I discovered the truth. 
I thought of Lykeham's Venetian mirror 
and his complacent side glances at his 
own image, and his belief that he was 
Apollo, and I laughed and laughed. And 
when, considerably after midnight, Lyke- 
ham got back to college, I mxCt him in 
the porch and took him quietly by the 
sleeve, and in his ear I whispered, " Goat- 
Foot," and then I roared with laughter 
once again. 



THE BOOKSHOP 

IT seemed indeed an unlikely place 
to find a bookshop. All the other 
commercial enterprises of the street aimed 
at purveying the barest necessities to the 
busy squalor of the quarter. In this, the 
main arterial street, there was a specious 
glitter and life produced by the swift 
passage of the traffic. It was almost airy, 
almost gay. But all around great tracts 
of slum pullulated dankly. The inhabit- 
ants did their shopping in the grand 
street ; they passed, holding gobbets of 
meat that showed glutinous even through 
the wrappings of paper ; they cheapened 
linoleum at upholstery doors ; women, 
black-bonneted and black-shawled, went 
shuffling to their marketing with dilapi- 
dated bags of straw plait. How should 
these, I wondered, buy books ? And 
yet there it was, a tiny shop ; and the 
windows were fitted with shelves, and 

there were the brown backs of books. 

259 



26o LIMBO 

To the right a large emporium over- 
flowed into the street with its fabu- 
lously cheap furniture ; to the left the 
curtained, discreet windows of an eating- 
house announced in chipped white 
letters the merits of sixpenny dinners. 
Between, so narrow as scarcely to prevent 
the junction of food and furniture, was 
the little shop. A door and four feet of 
dark window, that was the full extent 
of frontage. One saw here that literature 
was a luxury ; it took its proportionable 
room here in this place of necessity. 
Still, the comfort was that it survived, 
definitely survived. 

The owner of the shop was standing 
in the doorway, a little man, grizzle- 
bearded and with eyes very active round 
the corners of the spectacles that bridged 
his long, sharp nose. 

" Trade is good ? " I inquired. 

" Better in my grandfather's day," he 
told me, shaking his head sadly. 

" We grow progressively more Philis- 
tine," I suggested. 

" It is our cheap press. The ephemeral 
overwhelms the permanent, the classical." 

''This journalism," I agreed, ''or call 



THE BOOKSHOP 261 

it rather this piddling quotidianism, is 
the curse of our age." 

" Fit only for " He gesticulated 

clutchingly with his hands as though 
seeking the word. 

" For the fire." 

The old man was triumphantly em- 
phatic with his, " No : for the sewer." 

I laughed sympathetically at his 
passion. '' We are delightfully at one 
in our views," I told him. " May I look 
\? about me a little among your treasures ? " 

Within the shop was a brown twilight, 
redolent with old leather and the smell 
of that fine subtle dust that clings to 
the pages of forgotten books, as though 
preservative of their secrets — like the 
dry sand of Asian deserts beneath which, 
still incredibly intact, lie the treasures 
and the rubbish of a thousand years ago. 
I opened the first volume that came to 
my hand. It was a book of fashion- 
plates, tinted elaborately by hand in 
magenta and purple, maroon and sol- 
ferino and puce and those melting shades 
of green that a yet earlier generation had 
called " the sorrows of Werther." Beauties 
in crinolines swam with the amplitude 



262 LIMBO 

of pavilioned ships across the pages. 
Their feet were represented as thin and 
flat and black, like tea-leaves shyly pro- 
truding from under their petticoats. 
Their faces were egg-shaped, sleeked 
round with hair of glossy black, and ex- 
pressive of an immaculate purity. I 
thought of our modern fashion figures, 
with their heels and their arch of instep, 
their flattened faces and smile of pouting 
invitation. It was difficult not to be a 
deteriorationist. I am easily moved by 
symbols ; there is something of a Quarles 
in my nature. Lacking the philosophic 
mind, I prefer to see my abstractions 
concretely imaged. And it occurred to 
me then that if I wanted an emblem to 
picture the sacredness of marriage and 
the influence of the home I could not 
do better than choose two little black 
feet like tea-leaves peeping out decor- 
ously from under the hem of wide, 
disguising petticoats. While heels and 
thoroughbred insteps should figure — oh 
well, the reverse. 

The current of my thoughts was 
turned aside by the old man's voice. 
" I expect you are musical," he said. 



THE BOOKSHOP 263 

Oh yes, I was a little ; and he held 
out to me a bulky folio. 

" Did you ever hear this ? " he asked. 

Robert the Devil : no, I never had. 
I did not doubt that it was a gap in my 
musical education. 

The old man took the book and drew 
up a chair from the dim penetralia of the 
shop. It was then that I noticed a 
surprising fact : what I had, at a careless 
glance, taken to be a common counter 
I perceived now to be a piano of a square, 
unfamiliar shape. The old man sat 
down before it. " You must forgive any 
defects in its tone," he said, turning to 
me. " An early Broadwood, Georgian, 
you know, and has seen a deal of service 
in a hundred years." 

He opened the lid, and the yellow keys 
grinned at me in the darkness like the 
teeth of an ancient horse. 

The old man rustled pages till he 
found a desired place. " The ballet 
music," he said : " it's fine. Listen to 

this.;' 

His bony, rather tremulous hands 
began suddenly to move with an astonish- 
ing nimbleness, and there rose up, faint 



264 LIMBO 

and tinkling against the roar of the 
traffic, a gay pirouetting music. The 
instrument rattled considerably and the 
volume of sound was thin as the trickle 
of a drought-shrunken stream : but, still, 
it kept tune and the melody was there, 
filmy, aerial. 

" And now for the drinking-song," 
cried the old man, warming excitedly 
to his work. He played a series of 
chords that mounted modulating up- 
wards towards a breaking-point ; so 
supremely operatic as positively to be a 
parody of that moment of tautening 
suspense, when the singers are bracing 
themselves for a burst of passion. And 
then it came, the drinking chorus. One 
pictured to oneself cloaked men, wildly 
jovial over the emptiness of cardboard 
flagons. 

" Versiam' a tazza plena 
II generoso umor . . ." 

The old man's voice was cracked and 
shrill, but his enthusiasm made up for 
any defects in execution. I had never 
seen anyone so wholeheartedly a reveller. 
He turned over a few more pages. 
" Ah, the ' Valse Infernale,' " he said. 



THE BOOKSHOP 265 

" That's good." There was a little 
melancholy prelude and then the tune, 
not so infernal perhaps as one might 
have been led to expect, but still pleasant 
enough. I looked over his shoulder at 
the words and sang to his accompani- 
ment. 

" Demoni fatali 
Fantasmi d'orror, 
Dei regni infernal! 
Plaudite al signer." 

A great steam-driven brewer's lorry 
roared past with its annihilating thunder 
and utterly blotted out the last line. 
The old man's hands still moved over 
the yellow keys, my mouth opened and 
shut ; but there was no sound of words 
or music. It was as though the fatal 
demons, the phantasms of horror, had 
made a sudden irruption into this peaceful, 
abstracted place. 

I looked out through the narrow 
door. The traffic ceaselessly passed ; 
men and women hurried along with set 
faces. Phantasms of horror, all of them : 
infernal realms wherein they dwelt. 
Outside, men lived under the tyranny of 
things. Their every action was deter- 



266 LIMBO 

mined by the orders of mere matter, by 
money, and the tools of their trade and 
the unthinking laws of habit and con- 
vention. But here I seemed to be safe 
from things, living at a remove from 
actuality ; here where a bearded old 
man, improbable survival from some 
other time, indomitably played the music 
of romance, despite the fact that the 
phantasms of horror might occasionally 
drown the sound of it with their clamour. 
" So : will you take it ? " The voice 
of the old man broke across my thoughts. 
" I will let you have it for five shillings." 
He was holding out the thick, dilapidated 
volume towards me. His face wore a 
look of strained anxiety, I could see 
how eager he was to get my five shillings, 
how necessary, poor man ! for him. He 
has been, I thought with an unreason- 
able bitterness — he has been simply per- 
forming for my benefit, like a trained 
dog. His aloofness, his culture — all a 
business trick. I felt aggrieved. He 
was just one of the common phantasms 
of horror masquerading as the angel of 
this somewhat comic paradise of con- 
templation. I gave him a couple of 



THE BOOKSHOP 267 

half-crowns and he began wrapping the 
book in paper. 

'' I tell you," he said, '' I'm sorry to 
part with it. I get attached to my 
books, you know ; but they always have 
to go.';' 

He sighed with such an obvious genuine- 
ness of feeling that I repented of the 
judgment I had passed upon him. He 
was a reluctant inhabitant of the infernal 
realms, even as was I myself. 

Outside they were beginning to cry the 
evening papers : a ship sunk, trenches 
captured, somebody's new stirring 
speech. We looked at one another — 
the old bookseller and I — in silence. We 
understood one another without speech. 
Here were we in particular, and here 
was the whole of humanity in general, 
all faced by the hideous triumph of 
things. In this continued massacre of 
men, in this old man's enforced |sacrifice, 
matter equally triumphed. And walking 
homeward through Regent's Park, I too 
found matter triumphing over me. My 
book was unconscionably heavy, and I 
wondered what in the world I should do 
with a piano score of Robert the Devil 



268 LIMBO 

when I had got it home. It would only 
be another thing to weigh me down and 
hinder me ; and at the moment it was 
very, oh, abominably, heavy. I leaned 
over the railings that ring round the orna- 
mental water, and as unostentatiously as I 
could, I let the book fall into the bushes. 
I often think it would be best not to 
attempt the solution of the problem 
of life. Living is hard enough jwithout 
complicating the process by thinking 
about it. The wisest thing, perhaps, is 
to take for granted the " wearisome 
condition of humanity, born under one 
law, to another bound," and to leave 
the matter at that, without an attempt 
to reconcile the incompatibles. Oh, the 
absurd difficulty of it all ! And I have, 
moreover, wasted five shillings, which is 
serious, you know, in these thin times. 



THE DEATH OF LULLY 

THE sea lay in a breathing calm, and 
the galley, bosomed in its trans- 
parent water, stirred rhythmically to 
the slow pulse of its sleeping life. Down 
below there, fathoms away through the 
crystal-clear Mediterranean, the shadow 
of the ship lazily swung, moving, a long 
dark patch, very slowly back and forth 
across the white sand of the sea-bottom 
— very slowly, a scarcely perceptible 
advance and recession of the green dark- 
ness. Fishes sometimes passed, now 
hanging poised with idly tremulous fins, 
now darting onwards, effortless and in- 
credibly swift ; and always, as it seemed, 
utterly aimless, whether they rested or 
whether they moved ; as the life of 
angels their life seemed mysterious and 
unknowable. 

All was silence on board the ship. In 
their fetid cage below decks the rowers 

slept where they sat, chained, on their 

269 



270 LIMBO 

narrow benches. On deck the sailors 
lay sleeping or sat in little groups play- 
ing at dice. The fore-part of the deck 
was reserved, it seemed, for passengers 
of distinction. Two figures, a man and 
a woman, were reclining there on couches, 
their faces and half-bared limbs flushed 
in the coloured shadow that was thrown 
by the great red awning stretched above 
them. 

It was a nobleman, the sailors had 
heard, and his mistress that they had 
on board. They had taken their passage 
at Scanderoon, and were homeward bound 
for Spain. Proud as sin these Spaniards 
were ; the man treated them like slaves 
or dogs. As for the woman, she was 
well enough, but they could find as good 
a face and pair of breasts in their native 
Genoa. If anyone so much as looked at 
her from half the ship's length away it 
sent her possessor|into a rage. He had 
struck one man for smiling at her. 
Damned Catalonian, as jealous as a stag ; 
they wished him the stag's horns as well 
as its temper. 

It was intensely hot even under the 
awning. The man woke from his un- 



THE DEATH OF LULLY 271 

easy sleep and reached out to where on 
a Httle table beside him stood a deep 
silver cup of mixed wine and water. 
He drank a gulp of it ; it was as warm 
as blood and hardly cooled his throat. 
He turned over and, leaning on his 
elbow, looked at his companion. She 
on her back, quietly breathing through 
parted lips, still asleep. He leaned across 
and pinched her on the breast, so that 
she w^oke up with a sudden start and cry 
of pain. 

" Why did you wake me ? " she asked. 

He laughed and shrugged his shoulders. 
He had, indeed, had no reason for doing so, 
except that he did not like it that she 
should be comfortably asleep, while he 
was awake and unpleasantly conscious of 
the heat. 

" It is hotter than ever," he said, with 
a kind of gloomy satisfaction at the 
thought that she would now have to 
suffer the same discomiforts as himself. 
" The wine scorches instead of cooling ; 
the sun seems no lower down the sky." 

The woman pouted. " You pinched 
me cruelly," she said. "And I still do 
not know why you wanted to wake me." 



272 LIMBO 

He smiled again, this time with a good- 
humoured lasciviousness. ^^ I wanted to 
kiss you," he said. He passed his hand 
over her body possessively, as a man might 
caress a dog. 

Suddenly the quiet of the afternoon 
was shattered. A great clamour rose 
up, ragged and uneven, on the air. 
Shrill yells pierced the dull rumbling 
growl of bass voices, pierced the sound 
of beaten drums and hamimered metal. 

" What are they doing in the town ? " 
asked the woman anxiously of her lover. 

" God knows," he answered. " Per- 
haps the heathen hounds are making 
some trouble with our men." 

He got up and walked to the rail of 
the ship. A quarter of a mile away, 
across the smooth water of the bay, 
stood the little African town at which 
they had stopped to call. The sunlight 
showed everything with a hard and 
merciless definition. Sky, palms, white 
houses, domes, and towers seemed as 
though made from some hard enamelled 
metal. A ridge of low red hills rolled 
away to right and left. The sunshine 
gave to everything in the scene the same 



THE DEATH OF LULLY 273 

clarity of detail, so that to the eye of 
the onlooker there was no impression of 
distance. The whole thing seemed to 
be painted in flat upon a single plane. 

The young man returned to his couch 
under the awning and lay down. It 
was hotter than ever, or seemed so, at 
least, since he had made the exertion of 
getting up. He thought of high cool 
pastures in the hills, with the pleasant 
sound of streams, far down and out of 
sight in their deep channels. He thought 
of winds that were fresh and scented — 
winds that were not mere breaths of dust 
and fire. He thought of the shade of 
cypresses, a narrow opaque strip of dark- 
ness ; and he thought too of the green 
coolness, more diffused and fluid and 
transparent, of chestnut groves. And he 
thought of the people he remembered 
sitting under the trees — young people, gay 
and brightly dressed, whose life was all 
gaiety and deliciousness. There were 
the songs that they sang — he recalled 
the voices and the dancing of the strings. 
And there were perfumes and, when one 
drew closer, the faint intoxicating frag- 
rance of a woman's body. He thought of 
18 



274 LIMBO 

the stories they told ; one in particular 
came to his mind, a capital tale of a 
sorcerer who offered to change a peasant's 
wife into a mare, and how he gulled the 
husband and enjoyed the woman before his 
eyes, and the delightful excuses he made 
when she failed to change her shape. He 
smiled to himself at the thought of it, and 
stretching out a hand touched his mistress. 
Her bosom was soft to his fingers and damp 
with sweat ; he had an unpleasant notion 
that she was melting in the heat. 

" Why do you touch me ? " she asked. 

He made no reply, but turned away 
from her. He wondered how it would 
come to pass that people would rise again 
in the body. It seemed curious, consider- 
ing the manifest activities of worms. And 
suppose one rose in the body that one 
possessed in age. He shuddered, pictur- 
ing to himself what this woman would be 
like when she was sixty, seventy. She 
would be beyond words repulsive. Old 
men too were horrible. They stank, and 
their eyes were rheumy and rosiny, like 
the eyes of deer. He decided that he 
would kill himself before he grew old. 
He was eight-and-twenty now. He would 



THE DEATH OF LULLY 275 

give himself twelve years more. Then he 
would end it. His thoughts dimmed and 
faded away into sleep. 

The woman looked at him as he slept. 
He was a good man, she thought, though 
sometimes cruel. He was different from 
all the other men she had known. Once, 
when she was sixteen and a beginner in 
the business of love, she had thought that 
all men were always drunk when they 
made love. They were all dirty and like 
beasts ; she had felt herself superior to 
them. But this man was a nobleman. 
She could not understand him ; his 
thoughts were always obscure. She felt 
herself infinitely inferior to him. She 
was afraid of him and his occasional 
cruelty ; but still he was a good man, 
and he might do what he liked with her. 

From far off came the sound of oars, a 
rhythmical splash and creak. Somebody 
shouted, and from startlingly close at hand 
one of the sailors hallooed back. 

The young man woke up with a start. 

'^What is it ? '' he asked, turning with 
an angry look to the girl, as though he held 
her to be responsible for this breaking in 
upon his slumbers. 



276 LIMBO 

^^The boat, I think/' she said. ^^ It 
must be coming back from the shore." 

The boat's crew came up over the side, 
and all the stagnant life of the ship flowed 
excitedly round them. They were the 
centre of a vortex towards which all were 
drawn. Even the young Catalonian, for 
all his hatred of these stinking Genoese 
shipmen, was sucked into the eddy. 
Everybody was talking at once, and in the 
general hubbub of question and answer 
there was nothing coherent to be made 
out. Piercingly distinct above all the 
noise came the voice of the little cabin- 
boy, who had been to shore with the boat's 
crew. He was running round to everyone 
in turn repeating : " I hit one of them. 
You know. I hit one. With a stone on 
the forehead. Didn't he bleed, ooh! 
didn't he just ! " And he would dance 
with uncontrollable excitement. 

The captain held up his hand and 
shouted for silence. " One at a time, 
there," he ordered, and when order had 
a little been restored, added grumblingly, 
" Like a pack of dogs on a bone. You 
talk, boatswain." 

" I hit one of them," said the boy. 



THE DEATH OF LULLY 277 

Somebody cuffed him over the head, 
and he relapsed into silence. 

When the boatswain's story had 
rambled through labyrinths of digression, 
over countless obstacles of interruptions 
and emendations, to its conclusion, the 
Spaniard went back to join his companion 
under the awning. He had assumed 
again his habitual indifference. 

" Nearly butchered," he said languidly, 
in response to her eager questions. 
^'They'' — he jerked a hand in the 
direction of the town — '' they were 
pelting an old fellow who had come there 
preaching the Faith. Left him dead 
on the beach. Our men had to run 
for it." 

She could get no more out of him ; he 
turned over and pretended to go to sleep. 

Towards evening they received a visit 
from the captain. He was a large, hand- 
some man, with gold ear-rings glinting 
from among a bush of black hair. 

" Divine Providence," he remarked 
sententiously, after the usual courtesies 
had passed, " has called upon us to per- 
form a very notable work." 



278 LIMBO 

" Indeed ? " said the young man. 

"' No less a work/' continued the 
captain, " than to save from the clutches 
of the infidels and heathen the precious 
remains of a holy martyr." 

The captain let fall his pompous 
manner. It was evident that he had 
carefully prepared these pious sentences, 
they rolled so roundly off his tongue. 
But he was eager now to get on with 
his story, and it was in a homeher style 
that he went on : " If you knew these 
seas as well as I — and it's near twenty 
years now that I've been sailing them 
— you'd have some knowledge of this 
same holy man that — God rot their 
souls for it ! — these cursed Arabs have 
done to death here. I've heard of him 
more than once in my time, and not 
always well spoken of ; for, to tell the 
honest truth, he does more harm with 
his preachments to good Christian traders 
than ever he did good to black-hearted 
heathen dogs. Leave the bees alone, 
I say, and if you can get a little honey 
out of them quietly, so much the better ; 
but he goes about [among the beehives 
with a pole, stirring up trouble for him- 



THE DEATH OF LULLY 279 

self and others too. Leave them alone 
to their damnation, is what I say, and 
get what you can from them this side of 
hell. But, still, he has died a holy 
martyr's death. God rest his soul ! A 
martyr is a wonderful thing, you know, 
and it's not for the likes of us to under- 
stand what they mean by it all. 

" They do say, too, that he could make 
gold. And, to my mind, it would have 
been a thing more pleasing to God and 
man if he had stopped at home minting 
money for poor folks and dealing it 
round, so that there'd be no need to 
work any more and break oneself for a 
morsel of bread. Yes, he was great at 
gold-making and at the books too. They 
tell me he was called the Illuminated 
Doctor. But I know him still as plain 
Lully. I used to hear of him from my 
father, plain Lully, and no better once 
than he should have been. 

" My father was a shipwright in 
Minorca in those days — how long since ? 
Fifty, sixty years perhaps. He knew him 
then ; he has often told me the tale. And 
a raffish young dog he was. Drinking, 
drabbing, and dicing he outdid them 



28o LIMBO 

all, and between the bouts wrote poems, 
they say, which was more than the rest 
could do. But he gave it all up on the 
sudden. Gave away his lands, quitted his 
former companions, and turned hermit 
up in the hills, living alone like a fox in 
his burrow, high up above the vines. 
And all because of a woman and his 
own qualmish stomach." 

The shipmaster paused and helped 
himself to a little wine. " And what 
did this woman do ? " the girl asked 
curiously. 

" Ah, it's not what she did but what 
she didn't do," the captain answered, 
with a leer and wmk. " She kept him 
at his distance — all but once, all but 
once ; and that was what put him on 
the road to being a martyr. But there, 
I'm outrunning myself. I must go more 
soberly. 

" There was a lady of some consequence 
in the island — one of the Castellos, I 
think she was ; her first name has quite 
slipped my memory — Anastasia, or some- 
thing of the kind. Lully conceives a 
passion for her, and sighs and importunes 
her through I know not how many 



THE DEATH OF LULLY 281 

months and years. But her virtue stands 
steady as the judgment seat. Well, in 
the end, what happens was this. The 
story leaked out after it was all over, and 
he was turned hermit in the mountains. 
What happened, I say, was this. She 
tells him at last that he may come and 
see her, fixing some solitary twilight 
place and time, her own room at night- 
fall. You can guess how he washes and 
curls and scents himself, shaves his chin, 
chews anises, musks over whatever of 
the goat may cling about the body. Off 
he goes, dreaming swoons and ecstasies, 
foretasting inconceivable sweets. Arrived, 
he finds the lady a little melancholy — 
her settled humour, but a man might 
expect a smile at such a time. Still, 
nothing abashed, he falls at her feet and 
pours out his piteous case, telling her he 
has sighed through seven years, not closed 
an eye for above a hundred nights, is 
forepined to a shadow, and, in a word, 
wall perish unless she show some mercy. 
She, still melancholy — her settled 
humour, mark you — makes answer that 
she is ready to yield, and that her body is 
entirely his. With that, she lets herself 



282 LIMBO 

be done with as he pleases, but always 
sorrowfully. ' You are all mine/ says 
he — ' all mine ' — and unlaces her gor- 
geret to prove the same. But he was 
wrong. Another lover was already in 
her bosom, and his kisses had been pas- 
sionate — oh, burning passionate, for he 
had kissed away half her left breast. 
From the nipple down it had all been 
gnawed away by a cancer. 

" Bah, a man may see as bad as that 
any day in the street or at church-doors 
where beggars most congregate. I grant 
you that it is a nasty sight, worm-eaten 
flesh, but still — not enough, you 
will agree, to make yourself a hermit 
over. But there, I told you he had a 
queasiness of the stomach. But doubt- 
less it was all in God's plan to make a 
holy martyr of him. But for that same 
queasiness of his, he would still be 
living there, a superannuated rake ; or 
else have died in very foul odour, instead 
of passing, all embalmed with sanctity, 
to Paradise Gate. 

" I know not what happened to him 
between his hermit-hood and his quest 
for martyrdom. I saw him first a dozen 



THE DEATH OF LULLY 283 

years ago, down Tunis way. They were 
always clapping him into prison or pulling 
out his beard for preaching. This time, 
it seems, they have made a holy martyr 
of him, done the business thoroughly 
with no bungling. Well, may he pray 
for our souls at the throne of God. I 
go in secretly to-night to steal his body. 
It lies on the shore there beyond the 
jetty. It will be a notable work, I tell 
you, to bring back so precious a corpse 
to Christendom. A most notable 
work. . . ." 

The captain rubbed his hands. 

It was after midnight, but there was 
still a bustle of activity on board the 
galley. At any moment they were ex- 
pecting the arrival of the boat with the 
corpse of the martyr. A couch, neatly 
draped in black, with at its head and foot 
candles burning two by two, had been set 
out on the poop for the reception of the 
body. The captain called the young 
Spaniard and his mistress to come and 
see the bier. 

" That's a good bit of work for you," 
he said, with justifiable pride. " I defy 



284 LIMBO 

anyone to make a more decent resting- 
place for a martyr than that is. It could 
hardly have been done better on shore, 
with every appliance at hand. But we 
sailors, you know, can make anything 
out of nothing. A truckle-bed, a strip 
of tarred canvas, and four tallow dips 
from the cabin lanterns — there you are, 
a bier for a king.'' 

He hurried away, and a little later 
the young man and the girl could hear 
him giving orders and cursing some- 
where down below. The candles burned 
almost without a tremor in the windless 
air, and the reflections of the stars were 
long, thin tracks of fire along the utterly 
calm water. 

" Were there but perfumed flowers 
and the sound of a lute," said the young 
Spaniard, " the night would tremble into 
passion of its own accord. Love should 
come unsought on such a night as this, 
among these black waters and the stars 
that sleep so peacefully on their bosom." 

He put his arm. round the girl and 
bent his head to kiss her. But she averted 
her face. He could feel a shudder run 
her through the body. 



THE DEATH OF LULLY 285 

" Not to-night," she whispered. " I 
think of the poor dead man. I would 
rather pray." 

" No, no," he cried. " Forget him. 
Remember only that we are alive, and 
that we have but little time and none 
to waste." 

He drew her into the shadow under 
the bulwark, and, sitting down on a coil 
of rope, crushed her body to his own and 
began kissing her with fury. She lay, 
at first, limp in his arms, but gradually she 
kindled to his passion. 

A plash of oars announced the approach 
of the boat. The captain hallooed into 
the darkness : " Did you find him ? " 

" Yes, we have him here," came back 
the answer. 

" Good. Bring him alongside and 
we'll hoist him up. We have the bier in 
readiness. He shall lie in state to-night." 

"But he's not dead," shouted back 
the voice from the night. 

" Not dead ? " repeated the captain, 
thunderstruck. " But what about the 
bier, then ? " 

A thin, feeble voice came back. 
" Your work will not be wasted, my friend. 



286 LIMBO 

It will be but a short time before I need 
your bier." 

The captain, a little abashed, answered 
in a gentler tone, " We thought, holy 
father, that the heathens had done their 
worst and that Almighty God had already 
given you the martyr's crown." 

By this time the boat had emerged 
from the darkness. In the stern sheets 
an old man was lying, his white hair and 
beard stained with blood, his Dominican's 
robe torn and fouled with dust. At the 
sight of him, the captain pulled off his cap 
and dropped upon his knees. 

"^ Give us your blessing, holy father," 
he begged. 

The old man raised his hand and wished 
him peace. 

They lifted him on board and, at his 
own desire, laid him upon the bier which 
had been prepared for his dead body. 
" It would be a waste of trouble," he said, 
" to put me anywhere else, seeing I shall 
in any case be lying there so soon." 

So there he lay, very still under the four 
candles. One might have taken him for 
dead already, but that his eyes, when he 
opened them, shone so brightly. 



THE DEATH OF LULLY 287 

He dismissed from the poop every- 
one except the young Spaniard. '^We 
are countrymen," he said, " and of 
noble blood, both of us. I would 
rather have you near me than anyone 
else." 

The sailors knelt for a blessing and 
disappeared ; soon they could be heard 
w^eighing the anchor ; it v^as safest to be 
off before day. Like mourners at either 
side of the lighted bier crouched the 
Spaniard and his mistress. The body of 
the old man, v^ho was not yet dead, lay 
quiet under the candles. The martyr was 
silent for some time, but at last he opened 
his eyes and looked at the young man 
and the woman. 

" I too," he said, '^was in love, once. 
In this year falls the jubilee of my last 
earthly passion ; fifty years have run since 
last I longed after the flesh — fifty years 
since God opened my eyes to the hideous- 
ness of the corruption that man has 
brought upon himself. 

" You are young, and your bodies are 
clean and straight, with no blotch or ulcer 
or leprous taint to mar their much-desired 
beauty ; but because of your outward 



288 LIMBO 

pride, your souls, it may be, fester in- 
wardly the more. 

" And yet God made all perfect ; it 
is but accident and the evil of will that 
causes defaults. All metals should be 
gold, were it not that their elements 
willed evilly in their desire to combine. 
And so with men : the burning sulphur of 
passion, the salt of wisdom, the nimble 
mercurial soul should come together to 
make a golden being, incorruptible and 
rustless. But the elements mingle jar- 
ringly, not in a pure harmony of love, 
and gold is rare, while lead and iron and 
poisonous brass that leaves a taste as of 
remorse behind it are everywhere common. 

" God opened my eyes to it before 
my youth had too utterly wasted itself 
to rottenness. It was half a hundred 
years ago, but I see her still, my Am- 
brosia, with her white, sad face and her 
naked body and that monstrous ill eating 
away at her breast. 

" I have lived since then trying to amend 
the evil, trying to restore, as far as my 
poor powers would go, some measure of 
original perfection to the corrupted world. 
I have striven to give to all metals their true 



THE DEATH OF LULLY 289 

nature, to make true gold from the false, 
the unreal, the accidental metals, lead and 
copper and tin and iron. And I have 
essayed that more difficult alchemy, the 
transformation of men. I die now in 
my effort to purge away that most foul 
dross of misbelief from the souls of these 
heathen men. Have I achieved anything ? 
I know not.'' 

The galley was moving now, its head 
turned seaward. The candles shivered in 
the wand of its speed, casting uncertain, 
changing shadows upon his face. There 
was a long silence on the poop. The oars 
creaked and splashed. Somxetimes a 
shout w^ould come up from below, orders 
given by the overseer of the slaves, a curse, 
the sound of a blow. The old man spoke 
again, more weakly now, as though to 
himself. 

" I have had eighty years of it," he said — 
'' eighty years in the midst of this cor- 
roding sea of hatred and strife. A man 
has need to keep pure and unalloyed his 
core of gold, that little centre of per- 
fection with which all, even in this de- 
chnation of time, are born. r\ll other 
metal, though it be as tough as steel, 

19 



290 LIMBO 

as shining-hard as brass, will melt before 
the devouring bitterness of life. Hatred, 
lust, anger — the vile passions will cor- 
rode your will of iron, the warlike pomp 
of your front of brass. It needs the golden 
perfection of pure love and pure know- 
ledge to withstand them. 

" God has willed that I should be the 
stone — weak, indeed, in virtue — that has 
touched and transformed at least a little 
of baser metal into the gold that is above 
corruption. But it is hard work — thankless 
work. Man has made a hell of his world, 
and has set up gods of pain to rule it. 
Goatish gods, that revel and feast on the 
agony of it all, poring over the tortured 
world, like those hateful lovers, whose 
lust burns darkly into cruelty. 

" Fever goads us through life in a de- 
lirium of madness. Thirsting for the 
swamps of evil whence the fever came, 
thirsting for the mirages of his own 
delirium, man rushes headlong he knows 
not whither. And all the time a de- 
vouring cancer gnaws at his entrails. It 
will kill him in the end, when even the 
ghastly inspiration of fever will not be 
enough to whip him on. He will lie there, 



THE DEATH OF LULLY 291 

cumbering the earth, a heap of rottenness 
and pain, until at last the cleansing fire 
comes to sweep the horror away. 

" Fever and cancer ; acids that burn and 
corrode. ... I have had eighty years of 
it. Thank God, it is the end." 

It was already dawn ; the candles were 
hardly visible now in the light, faded to 
nothing, like souls in prosperity. In a 
little while the old man was asleep. 

The captain tiptoed up on to the poop 
and drew the young Spaniard aside for a 
confidential talk. 

" Do you think he will die to-day ? " 
he asked. 

The young man nodded. 

" God rest his soul," said the captain 
piously. " But do you think it would be 
best to take his body to Minorca or to 
Genoa ? At Minorca they would give 
much to have their own patron martyr. 
At the sam.e time it would add to the 
glory of Genoa to possess so holy a rehc, 
though he is in no way connected with 
the place. It's there is my diflSiculty. 
Suppose, you see, that my people of Genoa 
did not want the body, he being from 
Minorca and not one of them. I should 



292 LIMBO 

look a fool then, bringing it in in state. 
Oh, it's hard, it's hard. There's so much 
to think about. I am not sure but 
what I hadn't better put in at Minorca 
first. What do you think ? " 

The Spaniard shrugged his shoulders. 
*^ I have no advice to offer." 

^' Lord," said the captain as he bustled 
away, "life is a tangled knot to unravel." 



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